Eighteenth-century Devon. Old Noah Pargade is a wealthy yet curmudgeonly miser who marries the nubile and game Alice Eden. As anxious to avoid sharing his wife as he is his wealth, he makes sure she is enmured in his desolate old house on the moors. Fortunately for young Alice, there are enough young bucks in the vicinity whose advantage it is in to take pity on her. Noah's fears are well-founded, as Alice is able to continue her cheerfully sluttish goings-on. Especially when the swashbuckling John Truscott returns from his foreign travels, and quack doctor Cyriack Coke, replete with a cartload of bizarre colonic devices, visits the county. When the truth becomes plain, old Pargade is forced to take drastic measures.