Sarah and Beattie Melford have never understood each other. Beattie, raucous and fun-loving, sees her sister Sarah's quiet reserve as snobbery, and Sarah cannot understand why Beattie appears to upset their parents' comfortable Islington household at every opportunity. When Beattie has an affair with a naval officer her sister had hoped to marry, Sarah feels she can never forgive her. But the women never dreamed that the consequences of the affair would bind them so irrevocably together...