Edith Pargeter also writes as Ellis PetersHigh on a rocky outcrop stands a Victorian gothic mansion, built by the ancient and aristocratic Rose family. In the lodge of the house - the rest is owned by the National Trust - live the last of the fading line of the family. Rosalba Rose, at seventeen, has always been dutifully submissive to her ferocious eighty-year-old great-aunt Martine, but Rosalba's life contains little pleasure until she meets Eugene Seale, a young serviceman. Different as the two are, they fall in love, but is their passion, surrounded by upheaval, doomed?