Wilfred Davis, quiet, retired, respectable widower, is sitting and sobbing on a park bench. He has lost his daughter and any sense of purpose. A mysterious stranger passes him a handkerchief, and strikes up a conversation that leads to friendship and an unconventional new home for Wilfred.Mary Davis wants only four things out of life: a husband and three children, so at seventeen she runs away from school, her father and her home and moves to London to find them. Only a few months later Mary is engaged, but love and marriage promise to be very different from her childhood daydreams.For Mary and Wilfred, it seems Fate has taken a hand, or is there another kind of guiding spirit at play?Stella Gibbons" final novel, written in the 1970s but only discovered many years after her death, is published here for the first time.