She saw and heard once more the amused delight of Honoria Armstrong over her success, and the latent jealousy of the uxorious Colonel Armstrong if she came too often to see Honoria in Sloane Street:  And she remembered—­Oh God! How she remembered—­the close association in those three priceless years with her “godfather” Michael Rossiter; Rossiter who shaped her mind—­it would never take a different turn—­who was patient with her stupidity and petulance; an elder brother, a robust yet tactful chaffer; a banisher of too much sensibility, a constant encouragement to effort and success.  Rossiter, she knew, with her woman’s instinct, was innocently in love with her, but believed all the time he was satisfying his craving for a son to train, a disciple who might succeed him:  for he still believed that David when he had been called to the Bar and had flirted awhile with Themis, would yet turn his great and growing abilities to the service of Science.

And Mrs. Rossiter in those times:  Vivie smiled at the thought of her undefined jealousy.  She was anxious to be civil to a young man of whom Michael thought so highly.  She sympathized with his regret that they had no children, but why could he not take up with one of her cousin Bennet’s boys from Manchester, or Sophy’s son from Northallerton, or one of his own brother’s or sister’s children?  How on earth did he become acquainted with this young man from South Wales?  But she was determined not to be separated in any way from her husband, and so she sat with them as often and as long as she could in the library.  The studio-laboratory she could not stand with its horrid smell of chemicals; she also dreaded vaguely that vivisection went on there—­Michael of course had a license, though he was far too tender-hearted to torture sentient creatures.  Still he did odd things with frogs and rats and goats and monkeys; and her dread was that she might one day burst in on one of these sacrifices to science and see a transformed Michael, blood-stained, wielding a knife and dangerous if interrupted in his pursuit of a discovery.

But as the long talks and conferences of the two friends—­really not so far separated in age as one of them thought—­generally took place in the library, she assisted at a large proportion of them.  Rossiter would not have had it otherwise, though to David she was at times excessively irksome.  Her husband had long viewed her as a lay figure on these occasions.  He rarely replied to her flat remarks, her inconsequent platitudes, her yawns and quite transparent signals that it was time for the visitor to go.  Sometimes David took her hints and left:  he had no business to make himself a bore to any one.  Sometimes however Michael at last roused to consciousness of the fretful little presence would say “What?  Sweety? You still up.  Trot off to bed, my poppet, or you’ll lose the roses in your cheeks.”

The roses in Mrs. Rossiter’s cheeks at that time were beginning to be a trifle eczematous and of a fixed quality.  Nevertheless, though she tossed her head a little as she took up her “work” and swished out of the great heavy door—­which David opened—­she was pleased to think that Michael cared for her complexion and was solicitous about her rest.