Summary
In the opulent hush of Gilded-Age drawing rooms where gaslight trembles on Lalique glass, Mrs. Chapman Price—silk-draped, roulette-bruised—watches her husband’s silhouette recede like a creditor’s patience. Her mother’s safe yawns empty, a metallic scream swallowed by Aubusson rugs; the void indicts both the prodigal daughter and the quiet spinster–secretary who keeps the household’s heartbeat in ledgers and lilacs. When the Price heir vanishes into the urban night, suspicion metastasizes into a latticework of glances, forged signatures, and whispered alibies. A neighbor—Dick Ferguson, all tweed and tenacity—refuses the convenient narrative, chasing shadows through rain-glossed alleys and mahogany corridors until the real predator is unmasked: the very sleuth hired to excavate truth, now revealed as architect of calamity. In the flicker of a final reel, reputations are rewoven, lovers clasp hands across the rubble of reputations, and the city exhales a sigh as delicate as a spider’s thread snapping in dawn-light.
Synopsis
When Mrs. Chapman Price, the daughter of wealthy socialite Mrs. Janney, quarrels with her husband over her mounting gambling debts, he packs his suitcase and moves out. Desperate to pay off her debts, Mrs. Price rifles her mother's safe but discovers that its contents are missing. The blame points to Chapman Price and Esther Maitland, Mrs. Janney's private secretary. When the Price baby is kidnapped and held for ransom, Esther is suspected of that crime, too. Only Dick Ferguson, a neighbor, believes in Esther's innocence. After several misadventures, Esther discovers that the kidnapping was perpetrated by the detective whom Mrs. Price hired to unravel the burglary, which was committed by Ferguson's servant. Thus cleared, Esther joins the man who believed in her, and the Prices are reconciled.
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