The story opens with the family patriarch marching off to the Boer war at the turn of the century, and ends thirty years later, with the now-aged principal characters coping with the Depression and the bleak days following Queen Victoria's death.

A sensitive widow of delicate constitution falls in love with a cottage by the sea previously owned by Captain Robert Wilton who commited suicide. Feeling a ghostly prescence she becomes enchanted with him and he helps her to overcome her fears.