The home of Mrs. Bryson and her two daughters is happy except for the poverty that prevents the girls from sending their sick mother away to the mountains. Both help to support the household, but it is Shirley who feels the responsibility of her mother's approaching death and her worry is evident to all about her. She is employed in a manicure shop frequented by wealthy men and meets Wilfred Templeton, who invites her to dine with him. He questions her about her dejected air and she tells him of her mother's illness. This is Templeton's opportunity, and he asks her to make a bargain with him. He will give her all the money she needs and in return she is to live with him in an apartment which he will establish for her.

Silent film drama...

Glory Moore, a young girl, finds herself left unprovided for after her father's death, as the farm has to be sold to pay his debts.

Love's Crucible is a 1916 drama silent film.

A professor seeks to prove life after death by reviving a dead body.

Inventor George Grant and his partner, financier John Benson, accept an offer of $200,000 for the rights to an invention. After Grant breaks up a fight in a bar between drunken Dave Wilson and an old man reprimanding him, Dave is told by his mother to apologize to Grant. He meets Benson, who witnessed the fight, outside Grant's apartment and tells him his purpose, but during Dave's conversation with Grant, Grant suddenly drops dead. The police find Dave hiding, and after a pistol is found outside and Benson tells them about the fight but says he knew nothing about Dave's apology, Dave is convicted of murder and electrocuted.

Self-made man Emerson Boyd of Every-town owns the Boyd Mills, which uses child labor and disregards health regulations, and the Boyd Chemical Company, which manufactures harmful patent medicines. Crooked politician David Duncan, the mills's general manager, misinforms Boyd about factory conditions. After Boyd's beloved daughter postpones accepting the proposal of Matthew Brand, an unambitious rich young man, until he does something for humanity, Matthew reads an exposé of the mills by editor Clifford Cole. He buys Cole's newspaper when Boyd attempts to stifle it and supports the National Tuberculosis Society's proposal to build a sanitarium in Every-town to combat the rise of tuberculosis.

Jules, the son of French General Bleriot, agrees to give a masked blackmailer his father's secret military papers when threatened with exposure of his gambling debts. Masked, Jules steals the papers, but during a struggle with his father, Jules receives a knife wound in his arm.

From the dungeon where the lean beasts prowled, Hassan Bey summoned from her young lover's arms the old rug maker's daughter. Still she was obdurate. In his madness, he had poisoned his other love with the deadly sting of a serpent. His fury spent, he fell from bey to man, and sought to atone according to his light.

The young wife only reflected her aspiring mother's teaching. Her one ambition seemed to be for display and to keep her reputation as a woman of fashion. The husband's first weakness in fearing to tell her that the source of her power had gone, resulted in a second, a near-theft, nevertheless incriminating. Through it came the lesson.

Bessie, the bookkeeper, and Harry, the confidential clerk, are sweethearts. Harry does not fully realize the strength of Bessie's affection, but later, on the eve of a false step, he is made to appreciate her devotion and grit.