- Brothers James and Allen Mornington are both addicted to cocaine and both believe that their addiction is caused by a hereditary failing. James rises to the position of judge, but when Allen is brought into his court on drug charges, James resigns. The two brothers, along with James's daughter, Hilda, then retire to the country to fight their desire for drugs. Although James is under a doctor's care for his habit, Allen continues to supply his brother with cocaine. The doctor discovers this and in an argument is shot and killed by Allen. The murder snaps James's mind and Hilda, believing that her father is guilty, assumes the blame for the crime. She is convicted and sentenced to be hanged when the doctor's assistant, Franklin Shirley, comes to her aid. Shirley induces his friend, criminologist Mortimer Gildane, to take Hilda's case, and Gildane succeeds in extracting a confession from Allen. Acquitted of the crime, Hilda still fears falling heir to her family's predilection towards drugs, until Franklin dispels her apprehensions and she agrees to marry him.
- For generations the Mornington family had been cursed with a hereditary weakness. Judge Mornington, Hilda's father, had maintained an outward respectability, while inwardly he was a victim of the drug habit. Allen Mornington, his brother, was of an entirely different caliber. His one thought was to obtain the drug, and any attempt to thwart him met with murderous intent. Hilda, the judge's daughter, felt strongly her terrible inheritance, and resolved never to marry. But circumstances so shaped themselves that she was accused through circumstantial evidence of a murder which had been committed by her Uncle Allen. The mind of the judge failed him in this supreme hour, and he became insane. Only her resolve never to marry had prevented Hilda from accepting Franklin Shirley, a young doctor, whose theory was that the fear of heredity was an hallucination. One of Shirley's most intimate friends was Mortimer Gildane, a psychologist, who was carrying on investigations in the employ of the state to determine a way to correct criminal tendencies before actual crimes had been committed. To further his investigations the prison board permitted him to examine, just prior to their execution, criminals who were to suffer the death penalty. The day before Hilda was to be executed she was taken into Dr. Gildane's office for the usual examination. The doctor was surprised to find no trace of criminal tendencies in her, and during an exhaustive test Hilda fainted dead away, and neither the doctor nor the prison warden were able to revive her. Shirley was a specialist also in suspended animation, and Dr. Gildane called him up and asked him to revive his patient. "This is not a case of science," said Shirley, as he set to work feverishly, and it was only after he had succeeded that he was told that Hilda was to suffer the death penalty in a few hours. Then began a search for Allen Mornington, whom Shirley had seen several times, and whom he strongly suspected, from what Hilda told, him of having committed the crime. His search and the method of extracting a confession were successful, and Hilda was saved in the nick of time.
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