A traveling theatre company comes to Lund and one of the smallest hotels in town. A female actress gets a key by mistake to a room where Sten Stensson Stéen lives.
Stephan Gregorovitch, the unwilling king of a bankrupt Ruritanian country, along with his hucksterish chancellor and musically-inclined bodyguard, travel incognito to London for some fun.
Scheduled for demolition, Hotel Continental has seen 50 years of romance, intrigue, and tragedy. The last night attracts many nostalgic patrons, including a gangster planning to grab the loot that he hid there many years ago.
A foreword warns against the peril of yellow journalism, and the story illustrates it by following events in the upstate New York town of Cornwall after prominant financier George Ferguson is killed.
Among the travelers of varied backgrounds that meet and interact on one night at Union Depot, a metropolitan train station, are Chick and his friend Scrap Iron, both newly released from prison after serving time for vagrancy.