Though the film is presumed
lost, a synopsis survives in
The Moving Picture World from August 13, 1910. It states: "The story centers on Harry Willard, a plodding farmer. A city gentleman promises Harry's frivolous wife a life of ease and luxury - and it is the old, old story. She takes her tiny daughter, Agnes, with her, and leaves a note announcing the fact for Harry. The young farmer, who loves his wife and child with an all-consuming love, loses his reason as he reads the announcement of his betrayal. Although without the bare means for his subsistence, he searches for days for his loved ones. Eventually the strain, mental and physical, tells on him - he comes out of it all a maniac. His wrath takes the form of an aversion to all mankind. He wants to forget the world that has treated him so ill - he decides to become a hermit and betakes himself to a desolate cave, where he spends the years execrating humanity. A quarter century goes by. Rarely in that time does he venture on beaten paths for fear that he may meet a hated human, but one day he forgets his resolve long enough to cross a carriage drive. He hears the clatter of hooves and sights a horse tearing toward him with a swaying carriage and screaming occupants - runaway! As the carriage passes by him, a woman flings a bundle to him; he catches it and finds it a pink and white bit of humanity. Dazed he runs into the wilderness with a baby and makes for his cave. Arrived at the cave the maniac resolves to even his score with society by taking the babe's life. But his eyes light on the baby's locket and his hand is stayed. For the locket bears a picture of the child of the wife who betrayed him!" "The parents of the baby have miraculously escaped death in the crash of their carriage and trace the strange creature who rescued the child to his lair. They arrive as he ponders upon the picture in the locket and tries to recall the original of it. The babe is the daughter of the original and its mother the hermit's daughter, Agnes - the one-time tot whom the deserting wife took with her. A wife and mother, she is quite a mature woman now - but her features are unchanged. The face appears familiar to the hermit and he tries to place it. Eventually he succeeds. The shock of recognition dazes him - and changes him. The light of sanity returns to his eyes. His reason is restored. He takes to his breast the daughter whom he had lost and found again. She takes him from his forest home and back to the civilization that had tricked him. But the kindly care and love his daughter bestows on him to act in a measure as a recompense for the wrong done him in the long ago, and with the passing years the bitterness passes from his being. The picture touches the heartstrings; it will please to a certainty." == Production ==