Her desire for security wars with her desire for passion, for a life fully lived. Which will she choose?Alice Anne is a classic Hilton heroine: intelligent, headstrong, practical, unsentimental, and acutely aware that she doesn't fit in. She tries to create psychological order by obsessively arranging items in the store where she works, all the while leaving her emotional life untended. She sees love as an affliction, and when it does arrive in the guise of a wandering artist, she's unprepared and loses control. Succumbing to passion nearly always ends in disaster or some life-changing event in Hilton's fictional world, and such is the case in "Storm Passage". Later, Alice Ann meets the amoral, brilliant, con artist John Wilson — whose character owes a debt to Raffles, lovable rogue of the great E.W. Hornung stories — and finds she must choose between Wilson and the moral but boring intellectual Manley.In this, his second novel, James Hilton sounds themes that will dominate his fiction for decades to come: Is love its own justification? Is goodness the same as morality? Are there second acts to failed lives?