Benedict Morland's comfortable life is overset when an old enemy's dying wish leaves him guardian of an orphaned boy. No-one including his wife Sibella can understand why Benedict accepts Lennox Mynott into his household & amid growing hostility at Morland Place he takes the boy to America to join his daughter Mary at Twelvetrees Plantation. Here Benedict as well as Lennox fall in love with the Southern way of life just at the moment when bitter civil war is about to destroy it forever.