The quiet life style of Ruth Heck and her brother Lem, who belong to a religious sect called the Seekers, is disrupted when a judge imprisons Lem for a crime he did not commit.
When Mary and Fannie Graham, daughters of a good mother but a father with criminal instincts, are left motherless, Mary flees from her unhappy surroundings while Fannie, inheriting her father's disposition, remains and is raised as a thief.
When retired New England skipper Captain Purcell finds Kit as a baby in a storm, he adopts the child, who grows up to be an adventurous youngster of the docks.
Sue Gordon, a mountain girl on the Tennessee side of the Cumberlands, lives with her grandmother. When "Granny" dies, Sue--fulfilling Granny's dying wish--goes to Chicago to live with John Peyton, an industrialist who was at one time Sue's mother's fiancé. She finds that Peyton's employees are on strike, and one of the strike's leaders is Peyton's son, Donald, to whom she is becoming increasingly attracted. Complications ensue.
Characters in the film attend a movie titled 'Life’s Mirror', where they see parallel, cautionary versions of their own lives. Only the first two of the original seven reels survive.
A potentially lost film, this film tells the story of a man is convicted unjustly of a crime and then subjected to inhumane torment in a prison run by corrupt administrators.
When Gregory Van Houten went to the country to recuperate, he intended to remain only a few weeks and then return to plunge into the swirl of city gaieties. But when Van Houten returned he brought with him a country-girl wife and set upon himself the seal of new duties and obligations.
Monty Gray returns to the US after spending 10 years building railroads in China. As he enters a hotel he runs into an old friend from college whom he hasn't seen in years, and they begin catching up on old times. Monty notices a picture of a young woman that his friend is carrying and, bowled over by her beauty, he instantly falls for her.