Summary
A silhouetted scribe, Charles K. Harris, peers through rain-streaked glass at a lonely ambulance; the city’s gaslight halos fracture across the cobblestones, and in that trembling aperture he births a saga of champagne-married strangers, annulled vows, and a child flung like dice onto fate’s baize. Richard Hartley—heir to dynastic marble and gilt-edged ennui—plights a tipsy troth to Vera Walton, chorine with tinsel still clinging to her lashes; dawn annuls the union, exile ferments regret, and a cradle in a boarding-house rocks unattended. Two decades telescope: the foundling, now Dr. Victor Hartley, wears starched virtue like armor while his birth-mother, reborn as Nightingale Vera, glides through hospital corridors where chlorophyll light slices antiseptic gloom. An aristocratic club’s whispered slander detonates buried shrapnel; identities rupture, lineages entwine, and a final matrimonial embrace stitches the torn tapestry of shame into something perilously close to grace.
Synopsis
A prologue introduces author Charles K. Harris at his window, viewing a crowd that has gathered around an ambulance. Harris says to his clerk, "Only an abandoned child," and then dictates the following story. Richard Hartley, a millionaire's son, marries Vera Walton, a musical comedy dancing girl, while he is intoxicated at a party. Richard regrets this rash act when he becomes sober, and because he is under twenty-one, his father is able to have the marriage annulled. Richard goes abroad, during which time Vera gives birth to their son, whom she then deserts. When Richard returns, he weds his former fiancée, a respectable girl from his own set. Childless, the couple adopts Victor, Vera's child, unaware of his parentage. Twenty years later, Victor, a physician at a New York hospital, is engaged to Muriel Worth. Meanwhile, Vera, who has trained to be a nurse to be near Victor, is recognized by Richard's father, at the hospital after an accident. When a rival for Muriel's affection tells the Board of Governors of an exclusive club that Victor is trying to join that his father's a crook, Vera discloses her secret to them but keeps silent to Victor. Richard, whose wife died years earlier, learns about Vera's devotion, and marries her.
