Ellida was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, and spent many hours near the water's edge. While she was still scarcely more than a child, one of these ships put in for repairs at a fishing village near the lighthouse, and its second officer, while on a day's outing to kill time, visited the lighthouse. He there met Ellida, whose youth and beauty he admired. While his ship was still undergoing repairs, the second officer quarreled with his captain, and a fight ensued in which the captain was killed. The guilty man escaped from the ship, and making his way to the lighthouse, forced Ellida to assist in his flight. Before going he compelled her to plight her troth with him, inventing a strange ceremony to impress her, by fastening a ring which she wore to one of his, and casting them both into the sea. As soon as he had gone, Ellida wrote, telling him that she would not consider the engagement binding. The sailor paid no attention to her letter, and simply wrote that someday he would return to claim her and that she must wait for him. Being left alone by the death of her father, Ellida finally consented to become the wife of Dr. Wangel. The doctor was a widower with two grown daughters, and Ellida found herself a stranger in her new home, and spent much of her time alone. Her loneliness naturally led to a mental depression, and as the years passed, an awful dread grew in her mind of what her fate should be if her sailor lover ever returned to claim her. Her imagination had so strongly worked upon her, that when the sailor did finally return from the sea, she entreated her husband to allow her to go to him, although she feared, and had grown to hate the strange man. Dr. Wangel tried to show her that her duty and happiness lay with her husband and her home, but feeling that she would never be perfectly content with any fear darkening her life, he decided to tell her that she was absolutely free. When Ellida found that she was free to choose between the sailor and her husband she realized that this man who had been a fearful mystery, whose very existence she concealed from everyone, including her husband, was simply a man whom she disliked, and whom she could freely marry, or dismiss at her pleasure. Of her own free will she ordered the sailor to leave her, telling him that he no longer had power to intimidate or mystify her. With perfect trust and no secrets between them, Dr. Wangel and his Ellida started life anew, with no bar to their complete love and understanding.