Lorna was too young to marry, Paul Westbrook thought. She was only eighteen, and had seen very little of the world outside her English boarding school. Yet here she was, all alone and with very little money, in the strange world of the South Sea Islands, and how was she to be looked after if not by a husband? So he married her, meaning to maintain a distant relationship until she was older and more mature .. . but he had not allowed for the possible actions of sharp-tongued, disappointed women on one hand, or, on the other, of men who found his new wife pretty and charming. Both he and Lorna were to find that events and emotions were not so easy to foresee and control as they had supposed.