Two young clerks in a department store meet and fall in love during a seaside vacation in Maine, but part as strangers because, unknown to each other, both had been masquerading as upper-class 'swells', just to see how the better half lives.
Widow Martin struggles to rear her little daughter Nora amid the squalor of the slums yet imbue her with the refinement to which she had been accustomed in her girlhood.
Little Doris Calhoun, of a wealthy English family, makes a playmate of Pierre, a crippled gypsy boy, and drifts away with him and the gypsy band on their wanderings and is seen no more. In twelve years she becomes a great favorite with the gypsies, who have named her Kilmeny, but rather than be married to a brutal fellow, Barouche, she flees the camp.
