Elizabeth Martin is sent there to spend a summer with an aunt who seems more concerned with Robinsheugh's eighteenth-century owners than with her own niece, though a few years back the two of them had enjoyed a warm friendship. To Elizabeth, desperately lonely, unsure of herself and of others, the old house itself offers a strange alternative to misery — but one for which a harsh price has to be paid.

    The whole is an elegant and intensely imaginative recapturing of a life.