In a voice that trembles with emotion, he says: "You have harboured one whom misfortune follows wherever he wends his footsteps. Lest through me misfortune enter this house, I will depart." With firm, determined strides he already has reached the door, when she, forgetting all in the vague memories that his presence have stirred within her, calls after him:
"Tarry! You cannot bring sorrow to the house where sorrow already reigns!"
Her words are followed by a phrase freighted as if with sorrow, the Motive of the Wälsung Race, or =Wälsung Motive=:
_Siegmund_ returns to the hearth, while she, as if shamed by her outburst of feeling, allows her eyes to sink toward the ground. Leaning against the hearth, he rests his calm, steady gaze upon her, until she again raises her eyes to his, and they regard each other in long silence and with deep emotion. The woman is the first to start. She hears _Hunding_ leading his horse to the stall, and soon afterward he stands upon the threshold looking darkly upon his wife and the stranger. _Hunding_ is a man of great strength and stature, his eyes heavy-browed, his sinister features framed in thick black hair and beard, a sombre, threatful personality boding little good to whomever crosses his path.
With the approach of _Hunding_ there is a sudden change in the character of the music. Like a premonition of _Hunding's_ entrance we hear the =Hunding Motive=, _pp_. Then as _Hunding_, armed with spear and shield, stands upon the threshold, this Hunding Motive--as dark, forbidding, and portentous of woe to the two Wälsungs as _Hunding's_ sombre visage--resounds with dread power on the tubas:
Although weaponless, and _Hunding_ armed with spear and shield, the fugitive meets his scrutiny without flinching, while the woman, anticipating her husband's inquiry, explains that she had discovered him lying exhausted at the hearth and given him shelter. With an assumed graciousness that makes him, if anything, more forbidding, _Hunding_ orders her prepare the meal. While she does so he glances repeatedly from her to the stranger whom she has harboured, as if comparing their features and finding in them something to arouse his suspicions. "How like unto her," he mutters.