Shy, dreamy Harriet Poole is shattered when her brief affair with Simon Villiers, Oxford's leading playboy undergraduate, comes to an abrupt end, leaving her alone, penniless and pregnant Taking baby William with her, she accepts a job as nanny to the children of Cory Erskine, a writer who lives in Yorkshire Her misery heals in that unorthodox household as she grows to love the children and their father But he is still under the spell of his estranged wife, Noel