“Did that cut off the line?” said I, very quick.

“Oh, no,” said the family-tree man, “the line went on.  One of the duke’s younger sisters must have married a man on condition that he took the old family name, which is often done, and her descendants must have emigrated somewhere, for the name no longer appears in Hampshire; but probably not to America, for that was rather early for English emigration.”

“Do you suppose,” said I, “that they went to Scotland?”

“Very likely,” said he, after thinking a minute; “that would be probable enough.  Have you reason to suppose that there was a Scotch branch in your family?”

“Yes,” said I, for it would have been positively wrong in me to say that the feelings that I had for the Scotch hadn’t any meaning at all.

“Now then,” said Mr. Brandish, “there you are, madam.  There is a line all the way down from the Conqueror to the end of the sixteenth century, scarcely one man’s lifetime before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.”

I now began to calculate in my mind.  I was thirty years old; my mother, most likely, was about as old when I was born; that made sixty years.  Then my grandfather might have been forty when my mother was born, and there was a century.  As for my great-grandfather and his parents, I didn’t know anything about them.  Of course, there must have been such persons, but I didn’t know where they came from or where they went to.

“I can go back a century,” said I, “but that doesn’t begin to meet the end of the line you have marked out.  There’s a gap of about two hundred years.”

“Oh, I don’t think I would mind that,” said Mr. Brandish.  “Gaps of that kind are constantly occurring in family trees.  In fact, if we was to allow gaps of a century or so to interfere with the working out of family lines, it would cut off a great many noble ancestries from families of high position, especially in the colonies and abroad.  I beg you not to pay any attention to that, madam.”

My nerves was tingling with the thought of the Spanish Armada, and perhaps Bannockburn (which then made me wish I had known all this before I went to Stirling, but which battle, now as I write, I know must have been fought a long time before any of the Dorks went to Scotland), and I expect my eyes flashed with family pride, for do what I would I couldn’t sit calm and listen to what I was hearing.  But, after all, that two hundred years did weigh upon my mind.  “If you make a family tree for me,” said I, “you will have to cut off the trunk and begin again somewhere up in the air.”

“Oh, no,” said he, “we don’t do that.  We arrange the branches so that they overlap each other, and the dotted lines which indicate the missing portions are not noticed.  Then, after further investigation and more information, the dots can be run together and the tree made complete and perfect.”