Marie Dressler

Middle-aged housekeeper Emma (Marie Dressler) helps a lonely widower, Ronald Smith (Richard Cromwell) raising his spoiled and over-entitled children. When Smith takes Emma on a vacation, he makes his feelings for her known by proposing marriage. Emma happily accepts, but tragedy strikes when Smith dies of a heart attack shortly after. Emma is devastated, but then must face Smith's children, who suspect she may have been involved in the death of their father.

With her boozy boyfriend, the owner of a shabby dockside hotel scrimps and saves to give a child abandoned by her birth mother a life she never had.