A Love Story

Sir Henry Delmé, a soldier-baronet who has spent his youth restoring the fortunes of an old Norman family, falls in love at last at Leamington, with Julia Vernon, a widow's daughter he first sees sketching in a park. Then letters from Malta tell him that his younger brother George is ill and strangely troubled, and Henry leaves England to find him, only to find the reason in George's room: a young Greek girl. The search takes the brothers on to Naples and Rome, and breaks down much of what Henry believed a family owed its name. The author wrote the book in lonely evenings in the Australian bush and dedicated it to Lady Gipps, wife of the governor of New South Wales. Fifty-five plates after painters including William Powell Frith and Henry Moore carry the reader from English merry-making to the Salon d'Or at Homburg, matching the novel's movement from Leamington to the Continent.