And she was.  Never had Linda been so happy.  She overcame her disgust at the sight of blood, at monkeys, dogs, and humans under anaesthetics, at yellow fat, gleaming sinew, and blood-stained bone.  She was careful as a washer-up.  The services of Mrs. Adams were enlisted, and she was more deft even than her mistress; and the butler, who was by this time a regular hospital dresser, greatly admired her pretty arms when they were bared to the elbow, and her flushed cheeks when she took a humble part in some tantalizing adjustment.

“I’m some use to you after all,” Linda would say when they retired from the studio for a rest and she made the tea.  “Some use?  I should think so!” said Rossiter (whether truly or not).  And he reproached himself that twenty years ago he had not trained and developed her to help him in his work, to be a real companion in his studies.

He was really fond of her through the winter of 1916.  And so jovial and lover-like, so boyish in his fun, so like the typical Tommy home from the trenches.  When he was overjoyed at the success of some uncovered and peeped-at experiment, he would sing, “When I get me civvies on again, an’ it’s Home Sweet Home once more”; and ask for the ideal cottage “with rowses round the door—­And a nice warm bottle in me nice warm bed, An’ a nice soft pillow for me nice soft ’ead...”  Mrs. Rossiter began to think there was a good side to the War, after all.  It made some men more conscious of their home comforts and less exigent for intellectuality in their home companions.

They went out very little into Society.  Rossiter held that war-time parties were scandalous.  He poohpoohed the idea that immodest dancing with frisky matrons or abandoned spinsters was necessary to restore the shell-shocked nerves of temporary captains, locally-ranked majors, or the recently-joined subaltern.  He was far too busy for twaddly tea-fights and carping at hard-worked generals who were doing their best and a good best too.  He and Linda did dine occasionally with Honoria, but the latter felt she could not let herself go about Vivie in the presence of Mrs. Rossiter and seemed a little cold in manner.

Ordinarily, after working hard all day while the daylight lasted they much preferred an evening of complete solitude.  Rossiter’s new robustness of taste included love of a gramophone.  Money being no consideration with them, they acquired a tip-top one with superlative records; not so much the baaing, bellowing and shrieking of fashionable singers, but orchestral performances, heart-melting duets between violin and piano (what human voice ever came up to a good violin or violoncello?), racy comic songs, inspiriting two steps, xylophone symphonies, and dreamy, sensuous waltzes.  This gramophone Linda learnt to work; and while Michael read voraciously the works of Hunter, Hugh Owen Thomas, Stromeyer, Duchenne, Goodsir, Wolff, and Redfern on bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, cartilage, periosteum and osteogenesis—­or, more often, Keith’s compact and lucid analysis of their experiments and conclusions—­Linda let loose in the scented air of a log fire these varied melodies which attuned the mind to extraordinary perceptibility.