While giving a private performance for a visiting monarch, concert pianist Montgomery Royale is deafened when a bomb is detonated in an attempt to assassinate the foreign ruler. With his career over as a result of his injury, Royale returns to New York City with his sister Florence, close friend Mildred Miller, and considerably younger fiancée Grace Blair. After abandoning thoughts of suicide, Montgomery discovers he can lip read, and he spends his days observing people in Central Park from his apartment window. As he learns of people's problems, he tries to help them anonymously. He becomes absorbed in his game of "playing God" but his actions are without sincerity.
While visiting Monte Carlo with her aunt, Rosalie Dean meets a young man, Maxfield Gray who is ready to kill himself because of his losses at the roulette wheel. She stops him from doing so, and lends him some money to win back what he's lost. He does, but they're only happy for a short while before Max is arrested for the murder of his ex-wife in the States.
John Howland travels to the frozen North to build a branch of the Hudson Bay Railroad. There he meets and falls in love with Meleese Thoreau who warns him that her three bloodthirsty brothers, Max, Pierre and François, have sworn vengeance against a man named John Howland, the son of a man who killed their mother, and that torture and death await him along the route to his station.
