Maxwell Fair, an Englishman who has amassed a colossal fortune on ’Change, inherits from his ancestors a remarkable tendency to devote his life to some object, generally a worthy, if peculiar one, which is extravagantly chivalrous. The story opens with Fair and Mrs. Fair standing over the body of a man who has just been shot in their house—a foreigner, who had claimed to be an old friend of Mrs. Fair. Fair sends her to her room, saying: “Leave everything to me.” He hides the body in a chest, and decides to close the house “for a trip on the Continent.” Fair tells the governess, Kate Mettleby, that he loves her; that there is no dishonor in his love, in spite of Mrs. Fair’s existence, and that, until an hour ago, he thought he could marry her—could “break the self-imposed conditions of his weird life-purpose.” They are interrupted before Kate, who really loves him, is made to understand. While the Fairs are entertaining a few old friends at dinner, Kate, not knowing that it contains Mrs. Fair’s blood-stained dress, is about to hide a parcel in the chest when she is startled by the entrance of Samuel Ferret, a detective from Scotland Yard. He tells her that he, with other detectives, is shadowing the foreign gentleman who came to the Fair house that day and has not yet left it. He persuades Kate to promise that she will follow the suspect when he leaves the house and then report at Scotland Yard. As soon as Ferret is gone she lifts the lid off the chest, drops the package into it, and, with a shriek, falls fainting to the floor. Mr. and Mrs. Fair run to her aid. On being revived Kate goes to Scotland Yard, where, in her anxiety to shield Maxwell Fair from suspicion, she inadvertently leads the detectives to think that a crime has been committed at the Fair house. The two detectives are piecing together the real facts from the clues she has given, when Ferret is summoned to the telephone by his associate, Wilson, whom he had left on guard in the home of the Fairs. Fair tells Sir Nelson Poynter, at the latter’s country place, that he has committed some crime, and explains that Mrs. Fair is not his wife—that a Cuban scoundrel had married her, already having a wife, and deserted her, and that he, Fair, had brought her and her children to England, giving her his name before the world, yet being her husband in name only. Sir Nelson and Fair’s other friends, Allyne and Travers, begin to suspect his sanity. “But what is the ridiculous idea that has turned your head? What sort of idiotic crime would you ask us to believe that you have committed? Come, sir, out with it—what’s the charge against this villainous man?” asked Sir Nelson, with equal certainty and confidence.