Summary
A primordial fork in the heart: two brothers—one a libertine who brandishes promises like spent matches, the other a quiet dreamer who stores every tremor of conscience—circle Ann Hardy, the woman whose glance can tilt the axis of their small-town cosmos. When Lewis callously discards Rose Merritt, the wronged girl follows him home only to be met with slammed doors and stony silence, a moral fracture that echoes through David’s uneasy mind. As midnight pools into the parlour, David drifts into a triple-tiered nightmare, each tier a continent-sized prism of fate: an ice-bitten Alaskan saloon where Ann, now the card-sharp’s dazzling hostess, bleeds out beneath chandeliers of frost; a gilt-edged East-coast ballroom where masks slip and reputations shatter like crystal; and a sun-scorched Mexican plaza where a mestiza’s devotion is condemned by the clang of cathedral bells. In every dream the same coda—love skewered by betrayal, death sealing the ledger—until David snaps awake to rewrite destiny with a wedding band instead of a dirge.
Synopsis
David and Lewis Marsh are brothers. Lewis betrays Rose Merritt, then refuses to marry her when she follows him home. He is in love with Ann Hardy; his brother David also loves her and she loves him. Lewis pleads with David not to take Ann from him. While David is undecided what to do he falls asleep and dreams three different dreams, in which the characters in his own domestic tragedy act out the same finish to each episode. The first episode takes place in Alaska, where Ann is the companion of a gambling-house keeper and is killed by him for falling honestly in love with a young inventor who loves another woman. The second episode is in the East among a number of society people. The third episode introduces the betrayed woman as a Mexican girl who loves honestly but cannot escape her fate. At the finish David wakes up and decided to marry Ann himself.
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