What came next after his second marriage is not essential to the story. His wife died. His stepchildren were married and had families of their own to the second generation, when they, too, died, and still old Sandy lived on, his only companion now his half-brother Colin, who had come from Scotland to join him. One by one the descendants of his wives died and were scattered until in his last years, when nearly ninety, he knew of only one, and that was Reginald Travers, great-grandson of his first wife, in whom he felt no particular interest, until Reginald, who had heard of the rather eccentric old man, came to call upon him and claim relationship through the great-grandmother, dead years and years ago. Something in the young man pleased the older one, who kept him for weeks and finally conceived the idea of making him heir to a part of his fortune, which had grown steadily and was greater than his brother would care for. Colin, to whom he broached the subject, and who, being so much younger, was his right hand and left hand and brain, made no objections, but said: “Why leave everything to Reginald? There may be some member of the other branch of your family. You had two wives, you know, and one was Nannie’s cousin.” “To be sure; to be sure, I did,” Sandy answered, rubbing his bald head as if to recall an incident of more than fifty years ago. “You see I lived with Susie so short a time, and that girl of hers was married so young that things slip my mind, and sometimes it seems as if I was never married at all. Nothing is real but Nannie, who is as fresh in my mind as she was that last night when I kissed her for the last time. Poor little Nannie! and Susie was her cousin and looked some like her. There must be somebody somewhere related to her. I wish you’d hunt it up.” Colin was accustomed to hunt up things for his brother, and as a result of this investigation he found that Irene Burdick, the great-granddaughter of Mrs. Sandy McPherson the second, who was a relative of Nannie, was an orphan, with some means of her own, and was living with her aunt in New York, and also that she was spending a part of the summer in New London. Greatly to Colin’s surprise, the morning after he had imparted this information to his brother, he found him with his valise packed and himself dressed for a journey. “I’m going to New London,” he said, “going, incog., for a look at Ireny. She has some of Nannie’s blood in her. Pretty thin by this time, running through so many channels, it is true, but if she suits me, all right; if not, all right, the same.”