Spanning nearly fifty years, from the 1860s through to the turn of the century, THE TOUCH tells the story of Alexander Kinross, who flees from a childhood of poverty in Scotland to make his fortune in the Australian and the American gold fields. In the process he meets the woman he loves but can never marry -- and marries a woman who can never love him. When Alexander Kinross writes home to Scotland for a bride, he is remembered only as a shiftless young boilermaker's apprentice. Since he encloses a draft for one thousand pounds, however, arrangements are swiftly made to send him his young cousin Elizabeth, although it is her sister Jean whom he had wanted. So Elizabeth makes her way across the Atlantic by steam ship, and from there by sail, towards a land she knows nothing about, and a husband about whom she knows still less. Arriving in Sydney, she meets Alexander - handsome, devilish in appearance and manner, and obviously rich, and determined to get richer. He marries her, takes her home across the wild and barren countryside to his great house. What he does not tell her is that he made his first fortune in the California gold rush - and fell in love with perhaps the o