A man with a dark and secret past, kept lonely and shunned by others, decides he wants the companionship and love of a wife, so he corresponds briefly with a woman in England, who soon packs her trunk and books a passage on a ship bound for America. She leaves in the middle of the night to reach him and eventually is able to pick the tall, handsome but scarred man out of the crowd. When they reach his ranch in California she finds that the only way he can communicate effectively is through letters, so they start a daily correspondence with each other, even though they live in the same house.