A complex and compelling plot taking the heroine from her unhappy home in Sussex to a pensionnat in Brussels, to the glittering establishment of the Comte de la Ferte in Paris, and to the enclosing walls of a sinister relative in the North of England. Everywhere, the sprited Ellen Paget attracts a beaux, but their approaches are devious and wary, and she hardly knows how to take them. The family's implacable demand for a male heir, end in a shocking tragedy, and Ellen flees back to Petworth. Again the situation ends in tragedy, though not for our heroine, who at last finds the man she loves.