While her eccentric father perfects his latest invention, Nancy Fane wonders how she will clothe her brothers and sisters, and Mammy contemplates stealing the neighbor's chickens for dinner. One day Nancy hears a noise in the abandoned house next door and summons the sheriff, who reveals that the intruder is really Dick Ives, the house's owner.

A string of valuable pearls provides the motivation for the murder of Wareing, a widowed banker, who intended them for his daughter, Mary. She is comforted by Barton, a criminologist and friend of her late father, who appears to have left his financial affairs in a terrible state. Meanwhile, Mary's fiancé works diligently to identify the murderer. Although the criminologist places the blame on Wareing's butler, a reformed burglar, the killer is finally revealed to be Barton himself.

J.H. Wareing, a New York City financier, is found murdered in his library after the robbery of several securities and a necklace. Suspicion points to the butler, Jason, to whom Wareing had shown the necklace the night before. Wareing's daughter, Florence, is also a suspect and therefore denied her father's estate.

Billy Brice has been disqualified from the race track. He becomes sweetheart to a car manufacturer's daughter. Billy helps deal with the man's disgruntled ex-employees and hopes to clear his name so that he may race again.

Young Hugh Jordan, the nephew of the man who robbed the Winthrop children, is earning his living out west when he comes into the millions of his thieving old uncle. Hugh goes east and settles down to a life of ease and enjoyment. He is entertaining a stag party at his home when the butler announces the arrival of the Misses Winthrop.

Believing her husband to have died on an allied mission to Russia, wealthy Englishwoman Rosalind Dane devotes her life to her three-year-old daughter Patty. When a gypsy band arrives, Rosalind is strangely attracted to them and permits them to camp on her estate. She falls in love with one of them, Ben Galli, and throws a lawn fete, during which Rowena, a fortune-teller, predicts that there will be a tragic death in her family and that she will leave with the gypsies.