Summary
In a hushed New England seminary, trembling beneath the weight of its own piety, a prim theology student (Charlotte Merriam) discovers a cache of love letters stashed inside a cracked hymnal—correspondence that implicates the saintly dean, the janitor with a gambling ledger, and her own betrothed. Each ink-blotted page detonates like a small heresy, pitching candle-lit corridors into shadowed courts of suspicion. What begins as a whisper of flirtation snowballs into an institutional avalanche: clandestine nocturnal meetings inside the bell tower, a vanished dowry meant for missionary coffers, and a photographer (Neely Edwards) who arrives to chronicle the centennial but instead captures the moral implosion frame by frame. When the pregnant kitchen maid is found floating in the baptismal pool, the scandal ruptures the sanctified veneer, forcing every cassock-wearer to choose between dogma and survival. The final reel stages a kangaroo court in the chapel: stained-glass moonlight slices crimson across the pews while Ford Sterling’s cigar-chewing benefactor demands silence in exchange for endowment checks. Our heroine, once naïve, strides down the center aisle clutching the damning negatives, her wedding dress traded for a prison-striped overcoat, prepared to expose the rot even if it drags the steeple down with her.
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