Summary
A marble-skinned matron, Mrs. John Cleveland, drifts through velvet-draped parlors as though every breath were borrowed from a more merciful century; her husband’s gaze, acid-bright, corrodes the air between them. To smuggle tenderness past that vigilance, she adopts an infant yet secretes the child in a shadow-house, tended by a nurse whose past is a tinderbox. Enter Paul Horton—ex-con, scarred like a cathedral after a fire—once her lover, now blackmailer, brandishing memory like a straight razor. He discovers the nurse is the same woman who once swaddled his sins in linen and mercy, accuses her of bifurcated virtue, demands the glittering bribe of her diamonds. When the jewels bleed into a pawnbroker’s tray, the husband’s jealousy ignites; detectives sniff the marital corridors; recrimination curdles into exile. Yet Horton, in a final twist of grace, delivers a letter that rewrites bloodlines: the foundling is the husband’s own flesh, hidden by a wife who chose to bear the calumny rather than fracture the fragile bone of trust. In the hush after revelation, forgiveness—unasked, unearned—falls like snow on scorched earth.
Synopsis
Mrs. John Cleveland, victim of an overly-jealous husband, adopts a child but, fearing to bring it into her own household, furnishes another home for it, and places the little girl in charge of a nurse. Paul Horton, ex-convict and former sweetheart of Mrs. Cleveland, returns to the city and finds that his former nurse is the same woman who is caring for Mrs. Cleveland's child. Horton accuses her of leading a double life and demands money to keep the matter quiet. Her diamonds are given to him and he pawns them. The husband, finding the rings gone, places detectives on the trail. Finding that Horton has pawned them he shuns his wife. But Horton shows him a letter which proves that the child adopted by Mrs. Cleveland really belongs to her husband. Though the jealous husband had been unwilling to forgive, the loving wife grants forgiveness.
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