Alice Gaynor lives on a country estate with her Uncle John. He won't let her have friends, and she annoys him so much with her pranks that he decides to go away. While he is gone, Alice dresses as a maid, and meets Richard Comstock, an author traveling incognito. She says that she lives in a boarding house, and turns her uncle's home into one, using the servants as guests and the housekeeper as the landlady. All goes well until Uncle John returns, and the action moves to a hotel, a hunt club ball, and an encounter with a gentleman crook before the masks are raised and hearts are revealed. Harold MacGrath was a novelist, a short-story writer, and screen writer. He wrote at least a novel a year, had short stories in the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal, and became one of the first well-known writers to work in film.

Author Biography

Harold MacGrath (1871 - 1932) was a bestselling American novelist, short story writer and screenwriter. Also known occasionally as Harold McGrath, he was born in Syracuse, New York. As a young man, he worked as a reporter and columnist for the Syracuse Herald newspaper until the late 1890s when he published his first novel, a romance titled Arms and the Woman. According to the New York Times, his next book, The Puppet Crown, was the No.7 bestselling book in the United States for all of 1901. MacGrath subsequently wrote novels for the mass market about love, adventure, mystery, spies and the like at an average rate of more than one a year. He would have three more of his books that were among the top ten bestselling books of the year. At the same time, he published a number of short stories for major American magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal and Red Book magazine. Several of MacGrath's novels were serialized in these magazines and contributing to them was something he would continue to do until his death in 1932.