After Larry Darrent accidentally kills his lover's blackmailing husband, someone else is arrested for the crime. When he is found guilty, Larry and Wanda have just three weeks together before he must give himself up or let an innocent man go to the gallows.

Larry, black sheep of the Durrant family, kills Henry Wallen, the long-missing husband of his lover Wanda, when Wallen appears at Wanda's flat and threatens her life. After stashing Wallen's corpse in a deserted archway in Glove Lane, Larry goes to his brother Keith for advice. Keith, a brilliant attorney in line for a judgeship, pleads with Larry to leave the country and thus spare him the embarrassment of having a brother accused of murder. Larry refuses to leave however, and returns to the alley where he meets John Evan, a defrocked minister. Evan picks up Larry's gloves after he drops them in the street, and is later arrested for Wallen's murder based on the circumstantial evidence of the bloody gloves. When Larry learns of Evan's arrest, he decides to marry Wanda and live an idyllic existence in the three weeks before Evan's trial and then turn himself in for murder. As the debased Evan resigns himself to die, Wanda and Larry try to fit thirty years of living into three weeks. On the day that Evan is sentenced to hang, Keith begs his brother to remain silent and let the condemned man die, but Larry refuses and leaves for the police station, only to be stopped on the steps by Wanda, who has read the news announcing that Evan has died of a heart attack on his way to jail.