Pierre Glendinning Jr. is a nineteen-year-old heir who lives with his widowed mother at their family manor in upstate New York. Engaged to the beautiful and respectable Lucy Tartan, Pierre stands to inherit—with his mother’s approval—a life of comfort and wealth. When he meets a young woman named Isabel Banford, his father’s illegitimate daughter, Pierre devises a plan he believes will solve everyone’s problems: he will marry Isabel, who will inherit her share of their father’s wealth, thereby preserving his father’s honor and sparing his mother the embarrassment of her husband’s infidelity. Pierre marries Isabel in secret, and when he tells his mother is thrown out of the house and cut off from his family for good. He moves with Isabel to New York City, where he hopes to make a life for himself as a writer, but the sins of the past refuse to let him rest as he wrestles with his choices and discovers the true nature of his seemingly good intentions.
