Sybil Ellis is a seventeen-year-old orphan with very few options: If she doesn't want to be a governess or a companion - and she doesn't, she has to marry. So she marries Dr. Philip Maynard, who is old enough to be her grandfather and treats her like a daughter. In fact, he treats her like Judith, the daughter he had lost, even to calling her by that name and having all of his new servants do likewise. Then Sybil learns that there have been other and "daughters and " before her, and she realizes that this is not just a harmless eccentricity.