Frederick Barton, a young broker, receives an invitation for himself and wife to attend a fashionable ball. Mrs. Barton, a young and beautiful woman, but inclined to be somewhat vain, begs her husband for a sum of money with which to buy a gown. He gives her a check for the amount and the gown is purchased, Despite Barton's refusal to allow her to borrow jewelry for the occasion, she procures a pearl necklace from a friend, and finally wins her husband's consent to wear it. At the ball she is admired by all present, and is voted the most beautiful woman. Her hour of triumph over, she returns home to discover she has lost the necklace from about her throat. Wildly Barton rushes back to the scene of the ball, but the jewels are not found. The miserable couple now borrow large sums, and sell everything they have in the world to procure a duplicate necklace and return it in place of the lost one. Ten years later Mrs. Barton, now a widow, pays the last debt to her creditors. With whitened hair, and face lined from years of awful agony endured, she goes forth into the street and meets the friend who had loaned her the necklace back in the past years. Unable to bear her secret longer. Mrs. Barton confesses the awful tragedy of the lost jewels. That night, in her miserable rooms in the tenement, Mrs. Barton receives a letter from her friend, who, broken-hearted, reveals the fact that the necklace she loaned was but the cheapest imitation and not worth more than fifty dollars. With the realization of the terrible years of toil and struggle made to replace the worthless jewels with those costly and genuine, Mrs. Barton bows her head in agony as the bitter grief wells from her bursting heart in great sobs.
—Moving Picture World synopsis