that your father married Miss Sedgwick in the face of the most bitter opposition on the part of Edwin Brewster.  The latter refused to recognize her as his daughter, practically disowned his son, and heaped the harshest kind of calumny upon the Sedgwicks.  It was commonly believed about town that Jim Sedgwick left the country three or four years after this marriage for the sole reason that he and Edwin Brewster could not live in the same place.  So deep was his hatred of the old man that he fled to escape killing him.  It was known that upon one occasion he visited the office of his sister’s enemy for the purpose of slaying him, but something prevented.  He carried that hatred to the grave, as you will see.”

Montgomery Brewster was trying to gather himself together from within the fog which made himself and the world unreal.

“I believe I’d like to have you read this extraor—­the will, Mr. Grant,” he said, with an effort to hold his nerves in leash.

Mr. Grant cleared his throat and began in his still voice.  Once he looked up to find his listener eager, and again to find him grown indifferent.  He wondered dimly if this were a pose.

In brief, the last will of James T. Sedgwick bequeathed everything, real and personal, of which he died possessed, to his only nephew, Montgomery Brewster of New York, son of Robert and Louise Sedgwick Brewster.  Supplementing this all-important clause there was a set of conditions governing the final disposition of the estate.  The most extraordinary of these conditions was the one which required the heir to be absolutely penniless upon the twenty-sixth anniversary of his birth, September 23d.

The instrument went into detail in respect to this supreme condition.  It set forth that Montgomery Brewster was to have no other worldly possession than the clothes which covered him on the September day named.  He was to begin that day without a penny to his name, without a single article of jewelry, furniture or finance that he could call his own or could thereafter reclaim.  At nine o’clock, New York time, on the morning of September 23d, the executor, under the provisions of the will, was to make over and transfer to Montgomery Brewster all of the moneys, lands, bonds, and interests mentioned in the inventory which accompanied the will.  In the event that Montgomery Brewster had not, in every particular, complied with the requirements of the will, to the full satisfaction of the said executor, Swearengen Jones, the estate was to be distributed among certain institutions of charity designated in the instrument.  Underlying this imperative injunction of James Sedgwick was plainly discernible the motive that prompted it.  In almost so many words he declared that his heir should not receive the fortune if he possessed a single penny that had come to him, in any shape or form, from the man he hated, Edwin Peter Brewster.  While Sedgwick could not have known at the time of his death that the banker had bequeathed one million dollars to his grandson, it was more than apparent that he expected the young man to be enriched liberally by his enemy.  It was to preclude any possible chance of the mingling of his fortune with the smallest portion of Edwin P. Brewster’s that James Sedgwick, on his deathbed, put his hand to this astonishing instrument.