Gertrude Wyndham's Life and the War

Gertrude Wyndham had come to Providence as a young bride and had somehow fused an ill-knit family together and made the beautiful old house a place of refuge and healing. And then the war came.

Her daughter Sybil never returned from France. Defying all convention she went to live with Henri Blanchard, twenty years older than herself, a man who, for years, had been in love with her mother.

Ned Wyndham, the beloved son and heir of Providence, returned from the trenches a shell-shocked ghost locked into his own private hell. Only at Providence did he appear to return to some kind of tranquillity - and now it seemed as though the house must be sold, for the war had devastated the fortunes of the Wyndhams as well as Ned's sanity.

Lucy and the Hope for Salvation

It was Lucy who was to save their home. Frank Thornley, son of a wealthy Birmingham factory owner, desperately loved the third child of Providence. If she married him, the house and the family would be saved. And so Lucy, young, warm, vibrant, married Frank whom she did not love, and hoped that, in time, Providence would make everything come right for all of them.