Norbert is an honest man, possessed of all the courage of his love:  and he finds it hard to believe that the straightforward course would not be the best; but he yields to the dictates of feminine wisdom; and having consented to play a part, plays it with fatal success.  The Queen is a more unselfish woman than her young cousin suspects.  She has guessed Norbert’s love for Constance, and is prepared to sanction it; but her own nature is still only too capable of responding to the faintest touch of affection:  and at the seeming declaration that that love is her’s, her joy carries all before it.  She is married; but as she declares she will dissolve her marriage, merely formal as it has always been; she will cast convention to the winds, and become Norbert’s wife.  She opens her heart to Constance; tells her how she has yearned for love, and how she will repay it.  Constance knows, as she never knew, what a mystery of pain and passion has been that outwardly frozen life; and in a sudden impulse of pity and compunction, she determines that if possible its new happiness shall be permanent—­its delusions converted into truth.

She meets Norbert again; makes him talk of his future; discovers that he only dreams of it as bound up with the political career he has already entered upon; and though she sees that every vision of this future begins and ends in her, she sees, as justly, that its making or marring is in the Queen’s hands.  Here is a second motive for self-sacrifice.  Norbert has no suspicion of what he has done.  The Queen appears before Constance has had time to inform him of it; and the latter has now no choice but to let him learn it from the Queen’s own lips.  She draws her on, accordingly, under plea of Norbert’s diffidence, to speak of what she believes him to have asked of her, and what she knows to be already granted.  She tries to prompt his reply.

But Norbert will not be prompted.  He is slow to understand what is expected of him, very indignant when he does so; and in terror lest he should still be misunderstood—­in unconsciousness of the torture he is inflicting—­he asserts and re-asserts his respect for the one woman, his absorbing passion for the other.  The Queen goes out.  Her looks and silence have been ominous.  The shadow of a great dread falls upon the scene.  The dance-music stops.  Heavy footsteps are heard approaching.  Norbert and Constance stand awaiting their doom.  But they are united as they have never yet been, and they can defy it; for her love has shown itself as capable of all sacrifice—­his as above temptation.

Various theories have been formed as to the kind of woman Mr. Browning meant Constance to be; but a careful and unbiassed reading of the poem can leave no doubt on the subject.  He has given her, not the courage of an exclusively moral nature, but all the self-denial of a devoted one, growing with the demands which are made upon it.  How single-hearted is her attempt to sacrifice Norbert’s love, is sufficiently shown by one sentence, addressed to him after his interview with the Queen: