Summary
A marble-columned mansion, all hush and chandelier frost, receives the orphaned Edith Marsden—granddaughter to the iron-willed John Stanford, a nabob whose ledger of affections has long balanced at zero. Behind her trunks of threadbare lace lies a ruin: a mother disowned, a father in shackles for forged signatures, a brother lamed by shrapnel. Stanford, craving an heir untainted by scandal, anoints the girl his sunlit redemption and parades her before neighbors, chief among them the diffident Walling, whose gaze already lingers like dusk on ivory. Yet the past, liquor-soaked and twitching, stalks up the gravel drive: Marsden père, escaped convict, masquerades as Edith’s fictive brother, a trembling masque that shatters in a tavern’s amber haze when he snarls his true paternity to Walling. Night, quarry, sirens, a slip on wet shale—Marsden plummets, an Icarus of guilt, leaving the lovers to exhale into a dawn that feels suspiciously like absolution.
Synopsis
Wealthy and lonely John Stanford sends for Edith Marsden, the child of his disowned daughter, who, unknown to him, has just been evicted from her flat with her husband imprisoned for forgery and her son recovering from war wounds. Edith becomes a favorite of Stanford, who wishes to match her with a neighbor, Walling, who loves her. Meanwhile, Marsden escapes and comes to Edith under the guise of a brother, but in a drunken rage he reveals himself to Walling as her father. When pursued by the police, Marsden falls to his death in a quarry. Edith and Walling are then happily reunited.
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