It is the autumn of 1919. Elizabeth Mortlake, companion to her widowed sister-in-law, meets Jameson and Hunter, two ex-officers striving for some new measure of peace and order amid the ever-lengthening shadows of the war - one still hospitalized and awaiting the judgement of a court martial, the other seeking a more personal atonement for his unimaginable sins. Drawn increasingly into their lives here at the calm centre of the changing world, she gradually understands what a fragile peace they now inhabit, and how the ideals and bonds which once sustained and kept the two men alive, now threaten to destroy them completely.