Summary
A tempest, both meteorological and moral, flings Diana Webster—luminous, iron-willed—into the half-timbered limbo of a country inn where propriety hangs by a cobweb. Beside her stands Jimmy Harrison, affianced to her aunt yet electrically incidental to Diana’s pulse; a single candle brands them conspirators in the eyes of Bruce Terring, war-honed witness whose gaze calcifies suspicion into verdict. Home becomes courthouse when Bruce reappears beneath the same gabled roof, his silence a guillotine. Diana, stung by the tyranny of appearances, orchestrates a tutorial in epistemic humility: she hires two glowering extortionists to stage a counterfeit scandal, a pedagogic forgery meant to prove that retina and reality are estranged kin. But the masquerade metastasizes; blackmail blooms, revolvers click like metronomes, and the sheriff—that democratic equalizer—prepares a mass arrest as if crime were a contagion. Jimmy bursts back into the narrative like a deus ex machina in spats, unmasking the felons and laundering reputions with a single speech. Bruce, chastened, kneels metaphorically, confessing that faith is the only reliable lens; Diana, vindicated yet trembling, learns that the most perilous illusions are those we project for our own instruction.
Synopsis
Diana Webster and her aunt's fiancé, Jimmy Harrison, are caught in a storm and forced to spend the night in a country hotel; there they are seen by Bruce Terring, a friend of Diana's brother, Jack, and Bruce forms his own conclusions. Arriving home, Diana finds Bruce to be her brother's house guest, and as she is unable to convince Bruce of the innocence of her predicament, she plans to prove to him that seeing is not always believing, but the tables are turned on Diana when she engages two crooks. Meanwhile, Bruce learns of her innocence and finds her being blackmailed; in the mix-up that follows, the sheriff decides to arrest everyone. But Jimmy arrives, identifies the crooks, and vouches for his friends; and Bruce persuades Diana that he has complete faith in her.
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