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of a conjurer’s chest.
    “There was a first aid box in the clubhouse,” she explained. “They have everything. Even a stretcher. If there was someone to help me I could get you under cover.”
    “Oh, get on with it,” he said, and closed his eyes.
    He knew it would be painful, but he had no idea it could hurt as much as it did. For a second or so he lay still, feeling her hands on the broken limb. Then pain shot through his veins and was transmitted in waves through his whole body. Sourness drained from his mouth and in its place was the dry faintness, rising in his face and condensing on his forehead in sweat. He dug his fingers into the mackintosh, stiffened.
    “It’ll be all right,” he heard her say. She sounded far away; then suddenly real pain — something he had never before experienced. It was too much. He cried out, tried to sit up, hitting out blindly. The pain went on, biting into him, searing at his nerves. Suddenly he felt the contents of his stomach rush into his mouth and he had a horrible feeling of being drowned. Sickness broke acidly in his mouth, but in spite of this he heard distinctly a sharp click as the fractured ends of the bone locked together.
    For a minute or so he lost consciousness. The slipping away into darkness terrified him, and he clutched feebly at nothing, feeling himself sinking over the edge of a bottomless chasm. He cried out, and then plunged down and down.
    Then later, when he struggled back out of the darkness, saw the light reflected on the coloured umbrellas, felt the dull ache of his leg and smelt his sickness and tasted it in his mouth, he cried out again like a child waking from a nightmare.
    He felt a cold, firm hand in his. He clung to it and it gave him courage. She was talking to him, but he couldn’t be bothered to listen to what she was saying. It was enough to know she was near him, that she hadn’t gone out into the wind and the rain and left him alone.
    She held his hand for a long time until he fell asleep.
     

CHAPTER SIX
     
    Towards five o’clock in the morning it stopped raining, and the sun, pale behind the mist, came up from the east. The air was fresh, and a mild breeze sprang up, poking holes in the mist to reveal blue sky.
    Ellis stirred, uneasily, pulled the blanket up to his chin. The sunlight coming through the umbrella roof disturbed him, and he opened his eyes. For a long moment he didn’t know where he was, what he was doing in this hole in the ground. His hand went to his leg and he flinched. There was an extraordinary lightness inside his head and his mouth was dry. As his brain awakened, he remembered what had happened the previous night and he half sat up, his heart thumping unevenly. When he saw Grace curled up near his feet, asleep, he relaxed, reassured. So she was still with him, he thought, relieved, and he studied her for the first time, regarding her as a woman whose destiny was to be linked with his and not as a deaf nuisance who was to be used and discarded as soon as possible. He was surprised to see she had several unexpectedly good points. She wasn’t as plain as he had first thought. He was aware, too, that he was seeing her at her very worst. No one could look much if hungry and dirty. She had on no make-up, her hair was tangled, her clothes awful, but now he took the trouble to study her he saw she had a well-shaped nose and chin, soft full lips. Of course, she was nobody — lacked breeding, but then he was nobody and lacked breeding, too. He knew that. They were a pair. He was a traitor, the son of a reprieved murderer. She was a thief, an ex-jailbird. A fine pair, he thought bitterly, his eyes leaving her face to probe her body. It vaguely excited him. She could be made into something, he thought. If she had money, if someone took her in hand she mightn’t be half bad. Anyway, she had been unexpectedly useful. She had set his leg, and he was confident that she had made a good job of it.
    She had made him comfortable,