Scipio Africanus, a black servant in the Kentucky home of the Blairs, predicts misery will come to the house. Lisbeth Calvert, childhood sweetheart of her cousin, Larry Blair, prepares to marry him. The night of their engagement party in New York, Larry's friend Gail, a singer from the North, reveals to Larry that she's in love with him, then tries to commit suicide with acid, but Larry stops her and acid is splashed in his eyes. When the papers scandalize Larry's association with Gail, Lisbeth breaks her engagement with him. Julia "Granny" Blair, the family matriarch, intervenes to reunite the couple by planning the Blairstown centennial a year early to get Larry out of New York. Gail's doctor then tells her that Larry is slowly losing his sight and will never regain it. Meanwhile, Lisbeth and Larry are reconciled and she gives him a poem by nineteenth century English Romantic poet John Keats which expresses her feelings, but he is unable to read it and realizes he is going blind. A short time later, he asks Gail to join him in Blairstown in order to help him keep his blindness from Lisbeth. Gail arrives with her brother Trent, who is after the Blair fortune, and he seduces Lisbeth's impressionable younger sister, Lucy Belle. Although Gail wants to tell Lisbeth the truth about her motives for joining Larry in Blairstown, he does not want Lisbeth to have to take care of him all his life and hopes to let her down easy by making her believe he loves Gail. During the centennial radio broadcast, as Blairstown's black choir performs, Lucy Belle nearly elopes with Trent, but the town mayor, Jim Hopkins, who has loved Granny Blair for years, refuses to marry them. Gail confesses the truth to Lisbeth and she and Larry are reconciled. Larry's eyesight then starts to return.
