Set in prewar and wartime London, this novel tells the story of Lirazel, named by her devoted father after the fairy daughter in Lord Dunsany's King of the Elfland.

Deeply attached to him, she wants no other life than to be with her father and his friends. These include a doctor, who has escaped from Hitler's Germany, and who finds the girl alluring. Also among their circle of friends are Robert, a young banker who had been at Oxford University and intended to become a clergyman, and Cyril, a West Indian cricketer playing at Lord's cricket grounds in the summer.

The idyll is shattered when her father contracts pneumonia while planning a holiday abroad with his daughter and dies. Lirazel is desolate. Robert takes care of all the formalities of death and looks after her. Lirazel's father had left her very little except for the house where they had lived so happily. She does not wish to give it up, and she marries the banker so as to continue living in the house.

Though the doctor is angry about the marriage, it starts placidly, and she soon has a daughter, who is her delight. Unexpectedly, since Lirazel had seen so little of her mother's family, a cousin calls on her and tells her that the family has learned that while at Oxford, Robert had had an affair with a young boy in the town. This news sheds light on her relationship with Robert. Being inexperienced, she had not known that their brief and infrequent lovemaking was unusual.

Cyril comes back into her life at that moment and shows her what lovemaking between a man and a woman should be, and Lirazel learns the joys of love. Because their finances were tight, the young couple decides to sell her father's house and move out of London for the sake of her daughter. Then the war, which the whole nation had been expecting, breaks out, giving urgency to all the characters' plans.