The story
“An old fisherman and his daughter live together in a little cabin by the sea. They are gentle and refined, and do not mingle with the other fisher folk along the coast, who soon begin to justly surmise that the old man and the girl are hiding a secret they do not wish to disclose. One day, the old man saves a young man from the waves and carries him tenderly to the cabin. He and his daughter gently nurse the stranger, but their solicitude is changed to horror when they discover a police badge in the young man’s possession and a newspaper article, which identifies him as a detective who is searching for a bank embezzler. The man who had saved his life is the very person for whom the detective is looking. If the young man lives will he believe the truth—that the old man is innocent, but that circumstantial evidence is so strong that his guiltlessness could not be proved?
“’If he should live,’ the fisherman says to his daughter, ‘I could—,’ and then he recoils at the look in the young girl’s eyes. Liberty would be bought at too dear a price, if it cost the life of a human being. And so they nurse the young detective back to health. In the meantime the stranger has grown to love the beautiful girl. Constantly he is tormented by the fact that his oath as an officer of the law will oblige him to arrest her father and take him back to the city. When he is, at length, well, duty wins. He tells the ex-banker that he is under arrest. The old fisherman obeys without protest, but as they turn to go, the officer of the law reads the mute appeal in the girl’s eyes. Love seems so much stronger than duty, he wavers. It seems to the waiting girl that he had decided to disregard his duty as an officer and let her father go free. The detective does not have to make a decision, however. As he hesitates, a telegram comes, telling him to return to the city, because his quest for the guilty embezzler is ended. The real criminal had confessed on his death bed. It is a happy girl who bids a temporary farewell to the young detective, and a happier young man who goes back to the city, freed of the necessity of putting into the clutches of the law the father of the girl he loves.”
Summary from Reel Life · 18 September 1915
