France, on the eve of the French Revolution. Henriette and Louise have been raised together as sisters. When the plague that takes their parents' lives causes Louise's blindness, they decide to travel to Paris in search of a cure, but they separate when a lustful aristocrat crosses their path.
A naive country girl is tricked into a sham marriage by a wealthy womanizer, then must rebuild her life despite the taint of having borne a child out of wedlock.
In this story set at a seaside fishing village and inspired by a Charles Kingsley poem, a young couple's happy life is turned about by an accident. The husband, although saved from drowning, loses his memory. A child is on the way, and soon a daughter is born to his wife. We watch the passage of...
After the death of his wife the baby was all the sheriff had left, the promise of hope in the future, and the reflection of all that was dear in the past. But a sheriff has no time to tread a cradle rocker, so the baby started off on the long journey to relatives across the desert. Then the sheriff...
Soon after their engagement, Bill goes to sea, and Emily vows to stay true until his return. Unknown to her, Bill marries another woman from a different port. Emily waits faithfully for six years, finally becoming dangerously ill. When Bill suddenly appears in town with his family, Joe, who has...
Just before she dies, an elderly married woman stashes the horde of money she's secretly accumulated beneath the false bottom of an old shipping trunk. After her death, her husband, believing himself penniless, has to leave their old home and move in with his son's family, where he's treated with...
The hero, a young contractor, is mistaken by the heroine for a laborer, while he thinks she is the maid although she is the daughter of the manor. The hero continues to represent himself as a laborer in order to see the maid. The daughter, in order to continue her impersonation, borrows the maid's...
A husband suspects his wife of an affair. The wife's cousin borrows a shawl to meet her lover in the garden. The husband spies the couple embracing, and, thinking it's his wife, he strikes the lover. The thought that he has killed a man temporarily unhinges the husband's mind until he can be...
After her mother's death, Ruth struggles to support herself as a seamstress. While Ruth delivers shirts to the factory owner, the owner's son steals some money and Ruth is accused of the crime. She flees the ghetto of New York's Lower East Side and hides in the country where she meets a young...
John Logan leaves his parents and sweetheart in bucolic Happy Valley to make his fortune in the city. Those he left behind become miserable and beleaguered in his absence, but after several years he returns, a wealthy man. But his embittered father, not recognizing him for who he is, plans to...
A group of youngsters grow up and love in a peaceful French village. But war intrudes and peace is shattered. The German army invades and occupies village, bringing both destruction and torture. The young people of the village resist, some successfully, others tragically, until French troops retake...
An elderly actor who lives with his wife and daughter is dismissed from his acting job because he is considered too old. On his way home from the theatre he panics at the thought of telling his family the bad news and decides to disguise himself as a beggar. His daughter's beau accidentally gives...
Ramona, residing on her wealthy Spanish adoptive mother's rancho in California, falls in love with the Indian Alessandro. When Ramona is denied permission to marry Alessandro, the lovers elope, only to find a life of great hardship and unhappiness amidst the greed and injustice of the white...
Roy Norris, a young author, proposes to pretty Mary Ford and is accepted. The first year or more of their married life is one of bliss, made all the sweeter by the arrival of their first-born. The little trio, father, mother, baby, are bound together by love, until unreasonable jealousy possesses...
All the young men in the mining camp flirt with Lucy. Bud, the youngest of them, doesn't stand a chance. At a dance, Bud dresses as a woman and all the men flirt with him and abandon Lucy. When his disguise is revealed, the other men are too embarrassed to approach Lucy, and Bud dances the rest of...
During the American Revolution, a young soldier carrying a crucial message to General Washington is spotted and pursued by a group of enemy soldiers. He takes refuge with a civilian family, but is soon detected. The family and their neighbors must then make plans to see that the important message...
On a whim, a greedy tycoon decides to corner the world market in wheat. This doubles the price of bread, forcing grain producers into charity lines and others further into poverty. The film contrasts the differences between the lives of those who work to grow the wheat and the life of the man who...
