Damaris Hartbrook has grown up in a dark old house in a London square among the Sheraton and Chippendale of two elderly great-uncles, who think her a useful girl and rather sleepy. When they die, a codicil leaves everything to her cousin Dane, lately home from India, who has already proposed to her, now cools visibly and calls in Christie's to sell the lot. Damaris finds her dead mother's letters in a secret drawer, leaves Dane a note ending the engagement, and takes the train alone to the village of Marley, where the grandfather who never answered her father's letters is still the squire. She takes rooms over the baker's and tells no one who she is. Amy Le Feuvre wrote steadily for the religious publishers and had a good eye for a sheltered household. Thirty-five plates of quiet rooms, farm work and evening light by painters including Vilhelm Hammershøi and David Wilkie run through the story of a girl who leaves one sheltered household for another.