Because of an illness in the family that her mother has to attend to, Lloyd Sherman, the Little Colonel, is shipped off to boarding school from her home in Lloydsboro Valley, Kentucky. During the semester, the Little Colonel becomes friends with Ida Shane, founds a Shadow Club to raise money for the poor, and attends her very first Halloween masquerade. But as the Little Colonel returns home to her loving family and awaits the beginning of the New Year, she learns the most important lesson of her time away at school: absence makes the heart grow fonder.