"Oh, tell me, what shall your child do?" entreats the daughter, shaken by the sight of her father's passion. "Fight straightforwardly for Fricka," he orders her, in the excess of bitterness; "what she has chosen I choose likewise; of what good to me is a will of my own?" "Oh, retract that word!" she beseeches, "you love Siegmund.... Never shall your discordant dual directions enlist me against him. For your own sake, I know it, I will protect the Wälsung!" At this first intimation of rebellion in his child,--this incipient treachery of his own will,--Wotan becomes stern, lays down his command irrevocably, with threats of crushing retribution if this child of his shall dare to palter with his expressed will. "Keep a watch over yourself! Hold yourself in strong constraint! Put forth all your valour in the fight!... Have well in mind what I command: Siegmund is to fall! This be the Valkyrie's task!"
Brünnhilde gazes after him in wonder and fear as he storms up over the rocky ascent out of sight: "I never saw Sieg-vater like that!" Sadly she resumes her armour, woe-begone at the thought of the Wälsung, given over to death. Becoming aware of the approach of Siegmund and Sieglinde, she hastens from sight.
Sieglinde enters, fleeing in distraction from Siegmund, anxious in pursuit. The presumption of those seeing her action without understanding her words, is commonly, I suppose, that remorse has overtaken her for her breach of the moral law. Remorse, indeed, has assailed her, but not for having followed the "luminous brother." It is for having ever belonged to Hunding, whom she neither loved nor was loved by. The new sentiment of love so completely possessing her places her former union in the light of unspeakable pollution, and she adjures the "noble one" to depart from the accursed who brings him such a dowry of shame. Siegmund with sturdy tenderness assures her that whatever shame there is shall be washed away in the blood of him who is responsible for it, whose heart Nothung shall cleave. An insanity of terror seizes Sieglinde at the thought of the meeting between the two men, the vision besetting her of Siegmund torn by Hunding's dogs, against the multitude of which his sword is of no use. At the picture painted by her delirium of Siegmund's fall, shocked as if at the actual sight of it, she sinks unconscious in his arms.