"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:
[[Listen]]
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.
"Your name and story?" he asks, after they have seated themselves at the table in front of the ash-tree, and when the stranger hesitates, Hunding points to the woman's eager, inquiring look.