After Verity Scott’s father, an army officer, commits suicide she becomes an unpaid servant to her grasping relatives, the Farringdons. She is taken aback one day when the kind soldier who helped bury her father comes to the house as a guest, only now he is Lord Blakemore, an eligible bachelor. Blakemore does not recognize Verity at first, as she has been given a different name. The two are drawn to each other and she considers running away with him to become his mistress. However once he finds out who she really is, he offers her marriage instead.