Tom Chatterton is called a coward because he will not enlist in the Home Guard during the Civil War -- his mother is dying and he does not wish to leave while she is still alive.
A kind hearted actress who befriended a poor little waif of the street, soon grew to love the child. When she went on the road she found him a home with her old nurse.
Broken by grief after his mother's death, Olaf becomes a wanderer. He is treated cruelly until he is given a meal by a woman at the homestead where she lives with her husband and baby.
Outside the door of the home of a sculptor and his mother, fell a poor, friendless young girl. They took the girl in and cared for her, and as time went on the mother began to regard her as her daughter.
Dr. Sharp and his wife, Gretchen, live happily together in a little western town until the advent of the doctor's brother, Fred, who comes from the east to spend his vacation near his brother.