Sylvester Lanyon, a widowed doctor in the country town of Ayresford, is on the point of asking his father's ward, Ella Defries, to marry him when an old school friend is carried into his house with a broken head. In his delirium the man betrays that Sylvester's dead wife was his mistress, and Sylvester closes his heart, leaves for a London practice and lets Ella go. Before long she is engaged to Roderick Usher, a painter with a flamboyant manner, a scheme for an art colony and debts only her fortune can pay, and Sylvester is the one man in a position to stop the wedding. Locke wrote it while still secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, years before The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne and The Beloved Vagabond made his name. Fifty-eight plates by Constable and Corot follow the river valleys, mills and water meadows that give this story of a country doctor its quiet English light.