Wilfred Davis, quiet, retired, respectable widower, is sitting and sobbing on a park bench. He has lost his daughter and any sense of purpose. A mysterious stranger passes him a handkerchief, and strikes up a conversation that leads to friendship and an unconventional new home for Wilfred.

Mary Davis wants only four things out of life: a husband and three children, so at seventeen she runs away from school, her father and her home and moves to London to find them. Only a few months later Mary is engaged, but love and marriage promise to be very different from her childhood daydreams.

For Mary and Wilfred, it seems Fate has taken a hand, or is there another kind of guiding spirit at play?

Stella Gibbons' final novel, written in the 1970s but only discovered many years after her death, is published here for the first time.