Inconsiderate millionaire John Benson, philanthropist Oliver North, courageous Langdon Crane, wealthy idler Robert Curtis and Lydia Benson are among the passengers on an ocean liner that is sunk by a German submarine.
While traveling to meet her sweetheart, Richard Carr, in the capital of the Grand Duchy of Bonaluria, Peggy Dare's train compartment door is thrust open and a little boy is thrown at her feet.
Truthful Tulliver, a Westerner and a journeying newspaperman, followed by Silver Lode Thompson, printer and compositor, arrives in Glory Hole to start a newspaper.
John Howland travels to the frozen North to build a branch of the Hudson Bay Railroad. There he meets and falls in love with Meleese Thoreau who warns him that her three bloodthirsty brothers, Max, Pierre and François, have sworn vengeance against a man named John Howland, the son of a man who killed their mother, and that torture and death await him along the route to his station.
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.
The relationship between a painter and his lover fractures after the painter finds out she did not acquire a sum of money by selling his paintings, as she had claimed.
On the eve of her elopement with Henry Traquair, Margaret Fielding is accidentally discovered in Traquair's apartments by his friends, Captain Richard Haynes and Walter Maxwell.