The Roses of the Virgin

James Norwood, a wealthy lumber merchant, sends his dissolute son, Jack, to a lumber camp to give him a last chance to make good. The young man's habits of life, however, are so fixed that he soon forgets his good intentions and attempts to exercise his wiles on Marie, the pretty daughter of the camp foreman, although he is already a married man. Marie had previously promised her troth to Pierre Lolliard, a young lumberman long in her father's employ, but under the glamor of Jack Norwood's city ways she forgot her rustic lover and was about to elope with him when the plan was frustrated through the agency of a bunch of flowers. Pierre's mother had taken the last roses from her garden to adorn a wayside shrine of the Virgin. Marie had asked Pierre to get her some flowers intending to wear them at her wedding. Pierre, in the innocence of the intended use of the flowers steals them from the shrine but, as if by a miracle, the roses are the cause of a revelation of the true character of Jack Norwood and the elopement is stopped just in time and as a reverent and fitting climax to the play Marie and Pierre take the roses and again lay them at the feet of the Virgin whence they were originally taken.