When Flora is sent off to America to live with her uncle she leaves a home where she has always felt the odd one out. When she reaches her destination she finds her uncle already has a house-keeper who is something more to him and that behind the easy and luxurious life she has entered lay sorrow and racism.For this is the America of the mid-nineteenth century when native American Indians are being driven from their homes onto arid reservations and when the one man whom she begins to love is half Irish and half Indian and is determined not to be caught in the snare of an English girl.How she reconciles desire and duty makes a romantic and exciting story.