A beauty-loving French girl marries a wealthy Englishman and goes to his home to live. In her new life she finds herself misunderstood. Philip, her husband, is more interested in hunting and riding than in flowers or beauty. Mary feels stifled by the severity of her husband's manners. The sternness of his stately baronial home chills her. She realizes that Philip loves her and she tries to conceal her unhappiness. To remind herself of her childhood home in southern France she sends for a box of "Heartsease" and plants them in a bed directly beneath her window. Ten years elapse. Mary is the mother of two sons; the elder, a conventional English boy, the younger, reflecting the nature of his mother. Philip considers the younger boy a milksop and devotes himself entirely to the elder boy, training him to shoot and ride and become proficient in English sports. Mary dies, crushed by the coldness of her husband. Upon her breast the younger boy tremblingly places a little bunch of Heartsease. The dearest possession he now has is her portrait. Every night after the great mansion is in darkness, he steals from his room down the long corridor to the room in which her portrait hangs, and kneels before it adoringly. A terrific electric storm breaks over the estate. It would seem as though the heavens were risen in revolt. The younger son sits up in bed, muffling his ears with his hands and looking with awed eyes at the flashes of lightning that split the darkness without. The house catches fire. Flames leap from its great windows; dense smoke fills its corridors. The father rescues both boys. The younger son fights his way back to get the portrait of his mother. He gains the open air again with the portrait, but falls face downward upon the bed of Heartsease and dies from the effects of the smoke. Too late, the father realizes the pathos and bravery of the boy's life.