This is a sentimental romance with a Gothic setting, written in 1793 by Charlotte Smith, a poet and novelist who wrote to support her eight children. It is a complex story concerning Orlando, a second son, who must enter the military service for a living while his older brother wastes the family's small fortune. Orlando has a slight hope of an inheritance from a distant relative, the last owner of the Manor House, whose sinister housekeeper maintains her orphaned niece, one of Orlando's childhood friends. Around these two disinherited young people there is woven a plot of midnight meetings in a haunted house, banquets, smugglers, elopements, a missing will and the hero's adventures overseas during the American war of Independence. The novel attacks the injustice of the English inheritance system of the 1770s and the evils of war and slavery.