A twenty-year veteran of the printing room of The San Francisco Chronicle is passed up for a promotion at the same time his son is accused of graft and involved in scandal.
Poor abbé Contantin, he is devastated at the news: to think that two American ladies have bought the local manor where he has always been welcome! Worse, Mrs.
Ann, a 19-year-old girl who looks much younger, meets a dashing army major on a boat sailing from Liverpool to Bombay, India, and falls in love with him.
After being educated in England, Daisy Forbes returns to China, the country of her birth, and discovers that her father has recently died and that she has become a social outcast, owing to the public revelation that the oriental nurse who raised her was actually her mother.