Summary
A small-town stenographer, Dora Chester, incinerates her own future by trading the ardent, impecunious Robert Stanton for the gilded roulette of Kenneth Royce—an Eleventh-Commandment apostate whose marriage vow is nothing but a futures contract on her innocence. When Royce’s speculative empire implodes, he vampirizes the trust fund Dora guards for her employer, then vanishes into the civic shadows, leaving her to the iron-maiden silence of a women’s reformatory. Twelve calendar pages later, emancipated but branded, she re-enters life’s masquerade, rekindles with the still-smitten Robert, and attempts to smother the past beneath bridal veils—until Royce slithers back, a blackmailing Lazarus with a pistol for punctuation. In the final reel, a policeman’s bullet writes the epitaph, and Royce’s death-bed absolution arrives like a too-late telegram from a merciful God, restoring Dora to the only commandment that ever mattered: love, uncorrupted by price.
Synopsis
Dora Chester violates the Eleventh Commandment -- "Thou Shalt Marry None but the Man Thou Lovest" -- when she rejects her sweetheart, Robert Stanton, and becomes engaged to the wealthy Kenneth Royce. Royce is actually a stock gambler, and after he goes broke, he forces Dora to give him a sum of money that has been placed in her charge by her employer. Royce loses the money and runs away, but Dora refuses to implicate him in the crime and is sent to prison for a year. After her release, Dora meets and marries Robert, who knows nothing of the affair, but when Royce appears and threatens to blackmail her, she confesses everything. A policeman arrives and shoots Royce, who exonerates Dora just before his death.
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