Summary
Beneath the soot-choked streetlamps of a restless Chicago, star-reader Marie Osmond—part Sibyl, part socialite—charts destinies in celestial ink while her own fate spirals like a comet with a broken tail. She dismisses the ardent Henry Winters, whose love letters arrive with funereal regularity, citing the spectral accusation that she orchestrated her husband’s plunge from a high window years earlier. Hovering at the séance-like edge of her parlor is Davis, the laconic witness whose gaze seems to catalogue every tremor of her pulse. When Philip Morse—equal parts traveling salesman of the soul and penniless romantic—steps off the train, the city’s electric haze seems to part for him; Marie’s orbits realign, her horoscopes suddenly full of verbs that conjugate toward desire. Yet Morse is soon summoned eastward, where he collides with Violet, a gamine songbird who is, unbeknownst to him, the daughter Marie relinquished in a moment of blood-stained panic. Learning of their flirtation, Marie dispatches Davis like a jealous planet flinging a moon across space, only to discover via intercepted telegram that the girl’s identity is her own flesh. The revelation detonates: guilt, motherhood, erotic hunger, and the long shadow of homicide converge in a single scalding moment. A final inquest—equal parts courtroom thriller and confessional booth—exhumes the truth: the dead husband’s fall was suicide, staged to implicate Marie by a business partner who coveted her inheritance. With the murder hex lifted, Marie steps into the dawn air, daughter reclaimed, lover re-won, the city’s skyline suddenly legible as a promise rather than a prophecy.
Marie Osmond is an astrologer. Among her patrons is Henry Winters, who is in love with her. She tells Winters that she cannot marry him because of her being suspected of the murder of her husband some years before. Davis, who was present at the time of Marie's husband's death, is also a frequent caller at her house. Philip Morse comes to Chicago and here meets Marie, who falls in love with him. He is fascinated by the woman. He is called to New York and there meets Violet, a young girl, who is in reality Marie's daughter. Marie hears of his meeting the girl and sends Davis to New York to separate them. She later finds out that Violet is her own daughter, and after many troubles she is cleared of the murder of her husband and makes Morse happy by becoming his wife.
