Linda wondered whether she could do any indexing?  Three years ago Michael would have replied:  “You? Nonsense, my dear.  You’d only make a muddle of it.  Much better stick to your housekeeping” (which as a matter of fact was done in those days by cook, butler and parlour-maid).  But now he said, thoughtfully: 

“Well—­I don’t know—­perhaps you might.  There’s no reason you shouldn’t try.”

And Linda began trying.

But she also worked regularly in the laboratory now, calling it at his suggestion the lab, and stumbling no more over the word.  She wore a neat overall with tight sleeves and her hair plainly dressed under a little white, pleated cap.  She never now caught anything with her sleeve and switched it off the table; she never let anything drop, and was a most judicious duster and wiper-up.

Rossiter in this autumn of 1917 was extremely interested in certain crucial experiments he was making with spiculum in sponge-cells; with scleroblasts, “mason-cells,” osteoblasts, and “consciousness” in bone-cells.  Most of the glass jars in which these experiments were going on (those of the sponges in sea-water) required daylight for their progress.  There was no place for their storage more suitable than that portion of his studio-laboratory which was above ground; and the situation of his house in regard to air attacks, bombs, shrapnel seemed to him far more favourable than the upper rooms at the College of Surgeons.  That great building was often endangered because of its proximity to the Strand and Fleet Street; and the Strand and Fleet Street, being regarded by the Germans as arteries of Empire, were frequently attacked by German air-craft.

But in Rossiter’s studio there was an under-ground annex as continuation of the house cellars; and the household was instructed that if, in Rossiter’s absence, official warnings of an air-raid were given, certain jars were to be lifted carefully off the shelves and brought either into the library or taken down below in case, through shrapnel or through the vibration of neighbouring explosions, the glass of the studio roof was broken.

One day in October, 1917, the German air fleet made a determined attack on London.  It was intended this time to belie the stories of the heart of the Western district being exempted from punishment because Lady So-and-so lived there and had lent her house in East Anglia to the Empress and her children in 1912, or because Sir Somebody-else was really an arch spy of the Germans and had to go on residing in London.  So the aeroplanes this time began distributing their explosives very carefully over the residential area between Regent’s Park and Pall Mall, the Tottenham Court Road and Selfridge’s.

Lady Rossiter in her overall was disturbed at her indexing by the clamour of an approaching daylight raid; by the maroons, the clanging of bells, the hooters, the gunfire; and finally by the not very distant sounds of exploding bombs.  She called and rang for the servants, and then rushed from the library into the studio to commence removing the more important of the jars to a place of greater safety.  She had seized two of them, one under each arm, and was making for the library door, when there came the most awful crash she had ever heard, and resounding bangs which seemed to echo indefinitely in her ears....