Raphael Salvator, one of artistic New York’s youngest and most highly famed portrait painters, is commissioned by Banker Hargrave to paint the portrait of his daughter from a photograph. Salvator, unaware of the fact that Hargrave’s daughter is married to his old friend Conrad, falls passionately in love with the photograph. He puts his best work into the portrait and develops a masterpiece. The finished painting is sent by Hargrave as a present to his son-in-law and daughter. By coincidence, Salvator arranges to spend his vacation with his old friend Conrad, whose wife he has never met. Upon arrival at the Conrad’s, he meets Carrie, and the shock of her identity partially crazes him. He keeps secret his love for Conrad’s wife until at last it overpowers him. Then in a wild frenzy of jealousy he destroys the painting, wrecks the Conrad home and slays the unconscious object of his misery, Carrie. He is apprehended in his work of destruction and killing by Conrad, and the two men grapple. During the struggle the frenzied men fall from the veranda into the lake below, and the tragedy ends with the rippling waters gradually quieting o’er the murky grave of two former friends.