Robin Frayne has been brought up after her parent’s death by her sister and her husband but is very much a poor relation. She lives a boring, stultifying existence in the country, and when she attempts to leave her sisters ill health makes her feel obliged to stay with them but very much in the role of dogsbody. She has a lot to learn about life. All the experience of her eighteen years is no match for smooth-talking philanderer Aubrey Mauldron. Not surprisingly when the handsome young man appears in her life and is interested to her, she falls prey to the first man who offers to 'take her away from all this' and she is persuaded to runaway to Paris.
Once there she is persuaded to say the night at a hotel where he books her in as his wife. Following an incident where they meet a friend of Aubrey’s they have a row and Aubrey announces he did not really have any intention of marrying her, Robin leaves him and returns to England as wiser girl.
She becomes a companion to a lady she meets. Now less starry-eyed about men in general, she is soon falls in love with the lady's son Christopher, will will be everything that Aubrey is not: unselfish, generous, and honorabily interesting in her. Poor Robin not only feels that she is not able to marry Christopher because she is now his mother's companion but a friend of the family turns out to be the friend of Aubrey’s whom she met in Paris, and to whom she was introduced as Mauldron's wife... But ahead lies tragedy?