Sally Spenser has grown comfortable as an unmarried woman. She compensates for a lack of suitors by bestowing her affection on the two motherless children of the man she's loved all her life. It breaks her heart to see their father neglecting them, wallowing in self-pity and grief since losing his cherished wife in childbirth.
George Pembroke, Viscount Sedgewick, buries himself in liquor and gambling
