11Shock is a strange thing. With some people it acts on them instantaneously, so that they faint, cry or show other symptoms of an emotional nature but with others, and perhaps these are the more exceptional, it often takes hours or even days before the effects of a shock are felt.
Caroline, walking along the corridor to Lady Brecon’s room, felt only divorced from her immediate surroundings. She was so detached from reality that she could view herself and the events of the past twenty-four hours as if they were pictures of a vivid clearness but were not in actual fact an intrinsic part of herself. Only her love for Vane seemed a warm and living thing, and she clung to her realisation of this as if it were an anchor without which she would be adrift on a tempestuous sea of horror and fear.
