Margot Chesterton had reached the age of twenty, having always believed herself an orphan, before she learned that her father was still in fact alive and was believed to have emigrated on New Zealand. As Margot’s romance with Jonathan Worth had ended rather unhappily just then, it seemed rather a good idea to uproot herself for the time being and see if she could find her father. So off she set, and in the beautiful, still French town of Akaroa found what she could not help feeling was her spiritual home, so quickly did she settle down there and come to love it. But all this was not helping to find her father - nor was it helping to solve the problem of Pierre Lavereux, who refused to believe that Margot’s motives for being there were anything but sinister: an opinion of her that Margot would have given anything to have changed!