Gertrude Wyndham had come to the Providence as a young bride & had somehow fused an ill-knit family together & made the beautiful old house a place of refuge & healing. & then the war came. Her daughter Sybil had never returned from France. Defying all convention she went to live with Henri Blanchard, twenty years older than herself, a man who, for years, had been in love with her mother. Ned Wyndham, The beloved son & heir of Providence, returned from the trenches a shell-shocked ghost locked into his own private hell. Only in Providence did he appear to return to the some kind of tranquillity