The film starts out as a bus races alongside a train on a rainy night. It seems Francis and her fellow cheats (William "Stage" Boyd, Marjorie Gateson, and Charles D. Brown) have been thrown out of a hotel and must get out of town. On the train Boyd (a defrocked doctor) is summoned to the room of a dying woman. As she blurts out her story of abandoning her husband and son 14 years before, Boyd hatches the plan for Francis to impersonate the woman and get money out of the kid.