e drops on the ground, refusing any further speech.
When the king is now brought in upon a litter and halts on his
way to the lake for a moment's rest, receiving from Gurnemanz the
balsam, he thanks the woman, as one who has often before done him
such service. She rejects his thanks roughly, as if almost they
hurt: "No thanks! No thanks! What good will it do? Away! Away!
To the bath!"

The young esquires, lingering after the king has been borne onward,
eye her as she lies on the ground like a wild beast, and voice
their suspicion of her, founded, after the fashion of youth's
judgements, upon her looks. They believe those potions of hers
will finally destroy the king altogether. Gurnemanz checks them,
reminding them heatedly of her services, beyond all that any other
could perform. "Who, when we are at loss how to send tidings to
brethren warring in distant lands, we scarcely even know where,--who,
before we have come to any resolve, flies to them and returns,
having acquitted herself of the task aptly and faithfully?..."
"But," they object, "she hates us! See how malignantly she glowers
at us! She is a heathen, a sorceress!" "One she may be, perhaps,
labouring under a curse," Gurnemanz goes thus far with them; "she
lives here, it may be, a penitent, to expiate some unforgiven sin
of her earlier life." He tells how, so long ago as at the time
of the building of the temple, Titurel first found her among the
tangled growth of the forest, rigid in death-like sleep. "I myself,"
he continues, "discovered her but recently in the like condition.
It was soon after the calamity had befallen, brought upon us by
the evil one over the mountain." And turning to Kundry, as if the
thought had but just occurred: "Hey! Tell me, you! Where were you
roaming when our master lost the Spear?" The woman gazes gloomily,
and preserves a silence which we afterwards see to be significant.
"Why did you not help us at that time?" "I never help!" she exclaims
darkly, and turns away. "If she is as faithful as you say, and as
daring, and full of resource," suggests ironically one of the young
esquires, "why not send her after the lost Spear?" "That!" Gurnemanz
replies sadly, "is another matter. That nobody can achieve!" And,
the memory of the past rising strong within him, he relates to the
questioning young fellows, new in the brotherhood and ignorant of its
history, the events set down in their order a little way back. He
has repeated to them the m