But in Kinlochgarvie he found people on whose lives his coming acted as a catalyst for the hopes and despairs never acknowledged by them in secret. As a seemingly unattached man, he aroused in the local schoolmistress an insane, frustrated jealousy; in the pretty maid an overwhelming passion; in her rough, simple lover a burning hate. To the elderly spinster who ran the hotel he brought renewed consciousness of the life within her grasp; and to her honest, clear-sighted barman, the chance to benefit by this awakening. But it was through his attitude to Constance Kilgour, the impoverished laird's sister with her fatherless child and her fierce, humiliated pride, that he affected the people of Kinlochgarvie most powerfully. For to them Constance was a symbol either of depravity suitably punished or of misfortune one day to be rewarded by the return of her wartime lover. By both factions Hugh Carstares was immediately cast as this lover, hated, envied or applauded. And as the fiction turned to truth, and his pity for the child and her mother increased, he was to find himself involved in a relationship in which love and hate seemed inextricably mingled.