How rich and sparkling it was--the lights, the bright colors, the dancing music! "_Dolce Sacramento! Santo Sacramento!_" these words of an Italian hymn or litany recurred again and again, with endless iteration. Kitty's sensuous, excitable nature was stirred with delight. Then, suddenly, she remembered her child, and the little face she had seen for the last time in the coffin. She began to cry softly, hiding her face in her black veil. An unbearable longing possessed her. "I shall never have another child," she thought. "_That's_ all over." Then her thoughts wandered back to the party at Haggart, to the scene on the terrace, and to that rush of excitement which had mastered her, she scarcely knew how or why. She could still hear the Dean's voice--see the lamp wavering above her head. "What possessed me! I didn't care a straw whether the lamp set me on fire--whether I lived or died. I wanted to die." Was it because of that short conversation with William in the afternoon?--because of the calmness with which he had taken that word "separation," which she had thrown at him merely as a child boasts and threatens, never expecting for one moment to be taken at its word? She had proposed it to him before, after the night at Hamel Weir; she had been serious then, it had been an impulse of remorse, and he had laughed at her. But at Haggart it had been an impulse of temper, and he had taken it seriously. How the wound had rankled, all the afternoon, while she was chattering to the Royalties! And as she jumped on the pedestal, and saw his face of horror, there was the typical womanish triumph that she had made him _feel_--would make him feel yet more. How good, how tender he had been to her in her illness! And yet--yet? "He cares for politics, for his plans--not for me. He will never trust me again--as he did once. He'll never ask me to help him--he'll find ways not to--though he'll be very sweet to me all the time." And the thought of her nullity with him in the future, her insignificance in his life, tortured her. Why had she treated Lord Parham so? "I can be a lady when I choose," she said, mockingly, to herself. "I wasn't even a lady." Then suddenly there flashed on her memory a little picture of Lord Parham, standing spectacled and bewildered, peering into her slip of paper. She bent her head on her hands and laughed, a stifled, hysterical laugh, which scandalized the woman kneeling beside her. But the laugh was soon quenched again in restless pain. William's affection had been her only refuge in those weeks of moral and physical misery she had just passed through. "But it's only because he's so terribly sorry for me. It's all quite different. And I can't ever make him love me again in the old way.... It wasn't my fault. It's something born in me--that catches me by the throat." And she had the actual physical sense of some one strangled by a possessing force.