Based on Conrad's short story of a red-headed beauty of the eighteen-eighties who was a singer in an elegant Parisian night-club, whose laugh gave her the title of Laughing Anne. Her lover, Jen Farrell wins a fight that should have led to a meeting with heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan but crooks, who had sought to fix the fight, fixed him instead and Farrell is so hurt that Laughing Anne realizes he will never fight again. They drift to the Eastern seas where Anne becomes a singer in sordid Javanese bars. There she meets Captain Davidson, the master of a trading schooner, stows away on his ship and begs him to take her to Singapore. In the slow lazy cruise, Davidson falls under the spell of Laughing Anne and begs her to marry him, but she has learned from him an old forgotten sense of loyalty, jumps ship at Singapore and makes her way back to the blowzy, forlorn life with Farrell. Years later, Davidson meets her again when an unusual cargo takes him to a strange lonely, hot-and-steamy jungle settlement; the Woman with the Laugh has sunk in squalor and, although she is still with Farrell, she has a little boy named Davy with her. Davidson's heart and mind leap back to the rapture of that Archipelago cruise and he tells Annie he will take her and Davy away with him. But Farrell has heard of Davidson's rich cargo and plans to seize it.