Howard Moore, a millionaire clubman, returns home one evening to learn that his entire fortune has been swept away in the crash of the Eagle National Bank. The news almost drives him insane, but the fact that his fiancée has read of his misfortune and returns his engagement ring heartlessly is the thing that causes him to seek solace in the whiskey decanter, then determines to end it all. The revolver is raised to his temple, when a tapping is heard outside the large French window, and Moore is astonished to see a ragged derelict beckoning for admission and protection from the biting air. Moore admits the poor unfortunate, who has seen Moore raise the gun and questions him. The clubman shows him the newspaper and letter bitterly, and then is amazed when the fellow begins to relate a story almost identical with his own. While the two men remain seated at the table, the story is revealed in a beautiful vision how the young man was on the road to wealth in the stock market, engaged to a beautiful girl, then of his fortune being swept away in a panic, his engagement broken by the heartless vampire, who scorns him, his seeking consolation in drink, his course on the downward road until he has become what he is, a helpless, ragged derelict. The story finished, the outcast begs Moore to give up whiskey and make a man of himself. Moore promises, allows the whiskey to run out over the floor, tears the girl’s face from the frame on the table, grips the derelict’s hand, rewards him with a bill, then watches him vanish into the night from whence he came.