- When Grace Raymond follows Neil Garth, her hard-drinking fiancé, West, she finds him living in a squalid desert cabin. Forced to choose between being raped by outlaws or giving in to Neil's sexual demands, Grace moves in with her fiancé. A year later, Grace rescues James Stapleton, a gold miner, from a desert death and helps him to escape from Neil's greedy clutches. Before Neil can punish her, she knocks him out and flees to New York, where she meets and then marries Oliver West, a jeweler with failing vision. To help with his medical bills, Grace sells a short story, but Neil shows up and threatens to expose her past unless she gives him her earnings. Eventually, Oliver finds out about Grace and Neil and goes blind from the shock. Determined to win Oliver back, Grace enlists the help of Stapleton, now a rich broker, to thwart Neil and secure a sight-restoring operation for Oliver. When Oliver hears Neil's confession of Grace's difficult past, he finally forgives her.
- Grace Raymond and Neil Garth have grown up together and are sweethearts. Grace is innocent and affectionate. Neil drinks and is not particularly honorable. Neil tells Grace that he is going west to make his fortune and that when he does so he is going to write to her to come on. Grace consents. A year passes, and Neil has become a drunkard and a gambler. He writes to Grace that he has become prosperous and he urges her to come out and join him. She writes that she is coming. Neil, upon receipt of her letter, turns the woman out who has been his companion in his shack. Grace is disillusioned by Neil's appearance and the hovel to which he takes her. "But where is the minister who is going to marry us?" she questions before going into the house. Neil replies that the circuit rider will not be around until next Sunday. He quiets her fears and she enters. Inside Neil roughly catches her and kisses her. Grace declares that she is is going to leave him. But outside three of the rough men who had seen her arrive, catch sight of her leaving the hovel and make after her. In terror Grace returns to the shack. There Neil tells her that she must choose between the three men and himself. She decides to stay with Neil. A year later she has come to loathe the sight of Neil. One day Grace sees James Stapleton, a miner, struggling across the desert toward her. Stapleton is nearly dead from thirst and exhaustion. Grace takes him in. He shows her the sack of gold he has hoarded and says that it is going to set him up in business back east. Grace glances up and sees Neil peering through the window at the sack of gold. Realizing that Stapleton's life is in danger she hides him in the garret of the home. He promises to befriend her whenever the opportunity presents itself. Stapleton escapes when Neil comes to get his gold. Finding Stapleton gone and realizing that Grace has aided him to escape, Neil rolls up his sleeves to punish her. Grace knocks him senseless with a blow on the head with a bottle. Then she escapes. Back east Grace enters a mission conducted by Paul Ellsworth. In the course of her work she meets Oliver West, with whom she falls in love. They are married, but she does not tell him of her past. West's eyes, a year later, trouble him and the doctor tells him to give them a rest or otherwise he will go blind. Neil finds Grace and demands money, otherwise he will tell her husband her secret. Grace has just had a story accepted by a magazine and she endorses the check over to Neil. The mission minister advises her to tell West everything, but Grace dares not do it for fear the shock will make him blind. She tells her husband that she has lost the check. After a week of debauchery, Neil writes to Grace for a hundred dollars. She does not give it to him. Joan, West's cousin, finds the note and gives it to West. Grace denies knowing anything about it. Neil comes and tells him everything. Grace says that it is true, but she was an innocent victim. The shock makes her husband blind. He orders her out of the house. Grace sells another story and uses the money for an operation on her husband's eyes, but arranges it so that he does not know where the money comes from. Joan administers an overdose of medicine to the baby and it nearly dies, but Grace happens to come to the house opportunely and nurses the infant back to life. Grace is at her wit's end because she fears that her husband will never allow her to remain. She thinks of Stapleton. The minister brings him. The operation on West's eyes is successful. "Where is my baby?" is his first question. "The baby is with its mother," his sister replies. West is angered. "She saved a baby's life after Joan had intentionally given it an overdose of medicine which almost caused its death," declared West's sister. At this point, Stapleton, who has completely cowed Neil, brings him in. Neil grovels before Grace, and fearful of the punishment Stapleton will mete out to him if he does not tell the truth, tells the real story of Grace's experience in the west. West is amazed and horrified to hear of the things his wife was forced to endure and he gladly takes her back.
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