it he was heartily ashamed of his momentary lapse from high principles, ashamed that the woman in the case should have shown herself truer metal.  He resolved, so far as our poor human resolves are worth anything, to remain inflexibly true to his devoted Linda and to his career in biological Science.  He knew too well that if he were caught in adultery it would be all over with the great theories he was working to establish.  The Royal Society would condemn them.  Besides, so fine a resolve as Vivie’s, to live on the heights must be respected.

At the same time, it is certain that for the next three months he muddled his experiments, confused his arguments, lost his temper with a colleague on the Council of the Zoological Society, kicked the pugs—­even caused the most unbearable two of them to be poisoned by his assistant—­and lied in attributing their deaths to other causes.  He promised the weeping Linda a Pom instead; he said “Hell!” when the macaw interrupted them with raucous screams.  He let pass all sorts of misprints in his article on the Ductless Glands for the Encyclopaedia Scotica, he was always losing the thread of his discourse in his lectures at the London Institution and University College; and he spent too much of his valuable time writing hugely long letters on all sorts of subjects to David Williams.

David—­or Vivie—­replied much more laconically.  In the first place he—­she—­had had her say in the one big outpouring from which I have quoted so freely; in the second she did not wish to stoke up these fires lest they should become volcanic and break up a happy home and a great career.  She wrote once saying:  “If ever you were in trouble of any kind; if Linda should die before me, for example, I would come back to you from the ends of the earth and even if I were legitimately married to the Prince of Monaco; come back and serve you as a drudge, as a butt for your wit, as a sick nurse.  But meantime, Michael, you must play the game.”

And so after this three months’ frenzy was past, he did.  It was not always easy.  Linda’s devotion was touching.  She perceived—­though she hardly liked admitting it—­that her husband missed the society of “that” Mr. Williams, in whom she, for one, never could see anything particularly striking, and who was now travelling abroad on a quest it would be indelicate to particularize, and one that in her opinion should have been taken up by a far older man, the father of a grown-up family.  She strove to replace Williams as an intelligent companion in the Library and even in the Laboratory.  She gave up works of charity and espionage in Marylebone and many of her trips into Society, to sit more often with the dear Professor, and was a little distressed by his groans which seemed to be quite unprovoked by her remarks or her actions.  However as the months went by, Rossiter buckled down more to his work, and Mrs. Rossiter noticed that he engaged a new assistant at L300 a year to take charge of his