No fear of that! The Brocks were not nearly over, and they had to be disposed of before the Baxes could be taken in hand. Their exponent picked them up where she had dropped them. "My Mother's family," she resumed, "were well known during the Middle Ages. There were Brocks in Sampford Pagnell as early as fourteen hundred and four. They are even said to have been connected with John of Gaunt. Unhappily all the family documents, including an autograph letter of Alice Piers to Edward the Black Prince, were destroyed in the Great Fire of London." On lines like these, as we all know, a topic may be pursued for a very long time without the pursuer's hobby breaking down. It went on long enough in this case for Madeline to wish she could get a chance of utilising some courage she had been slowly mustering during the chase. This being hardly mature yet, she took another cup of tea, thank you! and sat on, supplying little notes of exclamation and pleased surprise whenever the manner of the narrator seemed to call for them. "It seems only the other day," Aunt Priscilla continued, with her eyes half-closed to express memory at work upon the past, "that I was taken as a little girl of six, to see my great-grandmother, then in her hundredth year. She was a friend of Horace Walpole. _Her_ mother could remember John Bunyan." "Is it possible!" said Madeline, very shaky about dates, but ready with any amount of wonderment. She added idiotically, "Of _course_ my father must have known _all_ your people, _quite_ well." Which did not follow from the apparent premisses. Mrs. Aiken muttered in a warning voice, for her visitor's ear only, "When Aunt gets on her grandmother she never gets off. You'll see!" She took advantage of the old lady's deafness to keep up a running comment. Miss Priscilla then approached a subject which required to be handled with the extremest delicacy. "I think, Euphemia," she said, "that after so long a time there can be no objection ... You know what I am referring to?" "Objection?--why should there be? Oh yes, _I_ know. Horace Walpole and your great-grandmother. No--none!" To Madeline Mrs. Aiken said in an undertone, "I told you how it would be." That young lady affected a lively interest in scandal against Queen Elizabeth, which was what she anticipated. "I myself," said Aunt Priscilla, in the leisurely way of a lecturer who has secured an audience, "have always held to the opinion that there was a marriage, but what the motives may have been for concealing it can only be conjectured...."