When Lavinia St Clyst married Julian Bossiney at St George's, Hanover Square, it was a marriage of convenience on both sides. Julian was linked at last to the real, the old aristocracy, and Lavinia, tolerated as a poor relation of the wealthy St Clyst family, could finally free herself from living on her uncle's charity and have a home of her own. It was at the fashionable wedding reception that - too late - she met the man she should have married - Jonathan Bossiney, her husband's brother.
As she began her new life in the beautiful old stone house standing high on the Cornish cliffs, so she determined that the unspoken love between her and Jonathan would remain secret and unfulfilled. For her children, Tristram and Jennifer, things would be different. There would be no obstacles to their love. But as the years passed, so the family pattern was repeated, of lovers divided by class, by wealth, by the very passion and wildness of their Cornish blood. It was not until the third generation that at last the cruel divisions were healed, and Lavinia also found her abiding happiness.