When Danger Smiles

A single gas-lit waltz, half-glimpsed through cigarette haze, brands Ray Chapman with the silhouette of a masked woman whose name he cannot coax from the brassy air; later, a bleeding good-Samaritan act lands him in the candle-scented sickroom of the very same Frania Caravalle, now unveiled yet unremembered. Oblivious, he signs a dynastic engagement contract with her iron-willed father, sealing a betrothal to a bride he still fails to recognize, thereby igniting Frania’s humiliated fury. She colludes with Jacob Holnar, the spurned wolf in white tie, to stage a lethal revenge, but the conspiracy misfires, burying Ray’s loyal friend Jim Barker instead and pinning the murder on the bewildered groom. A rope tightens around Ray’s throat beneath a righteous sky; salvation arrives in the thunder of hooves and the belated epiphany of a woman whose vengeance dissolves into desperate absolution.