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Jim Blake (Frank Keenan) works a shell game at a circus and has only one love in his life: his daughter Margaret (Tula Belle). While his daughter is away in school, he rises to bigger forms of manipulation and cheats millionaires with crooked real estate deals. Margaret (who, as a young woman, is played by Lois Wilson) becomes engaged to a young man whose father becomes one of Blake's victims. At first the girl believes her father to be innocent of any wrongdoing, but when she learns the truth, she and her father become estranged. She marries her sweetheart and moves away to Chicago. Blake is heartbroken when he receives word that the couple will not be visiting him at Christmas. He spends his first Christmas without his daughter by partying with some cronies. What he doesn't know is that Margaret had planned on surprising him, and when she and her husband arrive at his home the next morning, they find him dead from his overindulgence.