[1] Sydney clerk Kendall Curtis disappears on the day of his marriage to Vera with a sum of money belonging to his employer, the firm of Hardgoods, Hopkins and Co. His general manager, Horace Wakefield, persuades Vera to marry him instead.
It turns out that Wakefield is leading a double life as a bookie, Doods Dodson.
And that Wakefield had arranged for Curtis to be robbed on the way to the ceremony, drugged with chloroform, and dumped on a boat to Melbourne.
[2][3] The Sydney Morning Herald said the book "rejoices in a silver king, a missing bridegroom, a murder, a boxing school, and various other essential properties for a first class romance, and has the additional advantage of a local setting.
It is all furiously improbable, but there is something about it of the interest that attaches to melodrama and charms the gallery, and while the story is in progress one for gets to impose the foot-rule of rigid experience and probability.