Lennox and her five children (all in their late teens or early twenties). Number 4, the house next door, Miss Balfour, a gentle and unassuming spinster who was constantly surprised to find "how astonishingly nice and good people were when you knew them..."What she did not know and would not have believed was that the people who knew her could not help living up to her belief in their good qualities.

    Seven stories of South Africa deal with a missing body, a mysterious Rhodesian visitor, a pass law protest, a white geologist and his Black secretary, and a pair of childhood sweethearts.