- The story opens with blind beggar Peter von Helm seated on the street corner, playing a battered old violin and reviewing his life in memory. He is shown first on the eve of his triumph, in a large hall, playing to fashionable guests who applaud him wildly. A Miss Winton comes to meet him with her mother and asks him to their home. He refuses and rushes home to his expectant wife. Arriving,, he finds that a daughter has been born, but her mother is dying. He holds his wife in his arms as she passes away. A few weeks elapse and Miss Winton and her mother call upon him. The girl finds him in a receptive mood for sympathy and by a clever ruse forces him to hold her in his arms. Later he marries her. 18 years elapse. He lives in a beautiful home, run much too wildly by his wife. He sits alone in his study, reading a note from his daughter Margaret, telling of her proposed visit home, while his wife entertains lavishly in the gambling hall below, and flirts with Franklin. Von Helm, descending at length to his guests, finds her in Franklin's arms. At that moment his daughter arrives and he forgets all in the happiness of their meeting. Norton, his scheming friend, makes a play for her and the wife, to further her plans, decides to throw them together. Later, as she is planning for them to run away together, Von Helm enters in time to stop them. He turns in a fury on his wife and Margaret, and Norton escapes. He follows his wife to her boudoir and as he turns on her, she throws a lighted alcohol lamp in his face. When the doctors take off the bandages, they find he is blind. All is lost to him and he starts on the downward path. His vision ends and he rattles the little tin cup, begging for coins. 'Frisco Mag', who is his daughter Margaret, the lowest type of woman of the streets, comes along and seeing the beggar, gives him a few coins and speaks to him. Instantly he recognizes his daughter's voice and clutches her by the arm, finds that it is true. Overjoyed, the two cling to each other and she takes him home to his little tenement room. Then she walks to a corner of the room, smooths her hair, and takes off her cheap jewelry. When she kneels at his feet, he runs his hands over her smoothly parted hair and smiles a sigh of relief. He takes her in his arms and offers up a silent prayer.—Moving Picture World synopsis
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