What Romilly Williams doesn't know -- but the reader, through a lengthy flashback, does -- is that she's fated to live out the spell placed on her great grandmother and namesake by handsome, evil Rodger Graham before his sudden disappearance. On her summer vacation on the Scottish island of Karasay, Romilly falls in love with the ghost of the earlier Romilly's beau Jocelyn Parsons and is haunted by the long-dead Rodger, until she finds his skeleton in the cave where he practiced black magic and completes the exorcism with the help of eccentric old Miss Minnie. Romilly returns to art school in Edinburgh -- to meet Jocelyn's look-alike descendant at a "fancy-dress ball," and if Ruth Arthur is unable to make anything of all this witchery except a conventional middle-class match, the aura is properly ethereal while it lasts.