Summary
A devout physician, Stannard Wayne, weds Alice Porn, the former mistress of his libertine colleague Arthur Richards, and is promptly framed for Richards’s back-alley abortion, condemned to five iron years that transmute his piety into corrosive scorn. Emerging embittered, he drifts to a mist-lashed Northwest hamlet where fate has already installed his betrayer and the woman who once wore both their rings. There Margaret Haddon—a quiet zealot of compassion—pleads with the scoffer to mend a boy hobbled by paternal sadism; Wayne balks, then yields, scalpel in shaking hand. While he cuts, Richards’s torch-bearing chorus clamors outside; in the crucible of that chaos Wayne implores the heavens, and a miracle—luminous, preposterous—restores both the child’s legs and the doctor’s abandoned faith.
Synopsis
God-fearing Dr. Stannard Wayne marries Alice Porn, the former mistress of his friend, unethical Dr. Arthur Richards. When Richards performs an illegal abortion, he makes it look like Wayne is guilty, which gets Wayne sent to prison for five years. He emerges a changed man, a scoffer. By coincidence, he retreats to a village in the Northwest where Richards has gone with Alice. A kind townwoman, Margaret Haddon, urges Wayne to help a boy crippled by a beating from his father, but Wayne refuses. Margaret finally influences Wayne to perform the surgery, but during the operation an angry mob led by Richards descends upon the house. Wayne calls on Heaven for help and, by a miracle, the boy's life is saved and Wayne is deeply moved and his faith is restored.
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