A few minutes after ten o’clock it began to rain.Lying in the trench, Ellis cursed the rain. It fell lightly at first, but as more clouds climbed the horizon it began to pour: sheet after sheet of grey, cold water, chased by the wind, soaking into the open ground.He wished he hadn’t let Grace go. Now it was raining she would probably stay under cover and leave him out in the open to get on as best he could. She had been calm and tender when she realised that his leg was broken. It was odd that she should have behaved like that, Ellis thought. Now that she had him at her mercy she seemed to lose her fear of him, and instead of jeering at him and leaving him as he would have done in her place, she had actually made him comfortable and had straightened his broken leg so efficiently that he had scarcely felt any pain.“I’ll go to the clubhouse,” she had said. “Perhaps I can find something I can use as a splint.”He couldn’t understand how a girl of her type knew anything about broken limbs, and when he asked her, she explained that she had been a nursing orderly in the W.A.A.F.
