The Scarlet Road

Harry Tremaine, a clean-living youth of twenty-one, spends his leisure hours in perfecting an aeroplane motor which he has invented and which he hopes will eventually make his fortune. In his ambition to make his mark in the world, he is encouraged by his mother's old friend, Mrs. Holbrook, to whose daughter, Alice, Harry has been engaged almost since childhood. One night, when Harry is working late at the office in which he is employed as bookkeeper, a telegram arrives for the manager of the concern. Harry learns that the manager is dining at the Café de Paris and takes the message to him there. Thus Harry is first brought in contact with the gay night life of New York. There, too, he first sees Betty Belgrave, a cabaret entertainer, and her dancing partner, Wilbur Lorimer. It is not long afterward that Harry Tremaine receives word that his father, who for a number of years has been leading a hermit's life in the mining country out west, has suddenly died. Still later he learns that instead of using the money which he had thought he was contributing to his father's support, the hermit had saved all of it, and in addition left him a fortune of nearly $200,000. Harry's first thought is that there is no longer any bar to the marriage of himself and Alice, and the wedding day is set. Circumstances again bring Harry into the sphere of Betty Belgrave and her dancing partner, this time as a bashful, awkward youth, but as a young man about town who has plenty of money to spend. The woman has little trouble in conquering Harry. The consequence is that with her wedding day approaching, Alice finds herself more and more neglected by her fiancé. Day by day she sees him less frequently and day by day he becomes more thoroughly enmeshed in Betty's net of fascinations. Finally, on New Year's Eve, comes a complete break between the engaged couple as the result of Harry's escapades. Then, after a few short weeks of riotous living, during which he spends money like water to gratify Betty's whims, and buys thousands of dollars' worth of worthless stocks offered by Wilbur, Harry suddenly awakens to the fact that he is "broke." Naturally, he is deserted by his gay friends, first of all by Betty and Wilbur the parasites. Unable to obtain employment, he is soon reduced to desperate straits. One day Harry calls upon his father's lawyer who gives him a letter left by the hermit "to be delivered to my son when he shall have dissipated his fortune." The letter explains that the fat