Walking the corridors of Brookhampton General are two young physicians, products of entirely different systems and environments. Hugh Ravelston, a member of an English medical family, and his friend Maxwell Okiya, son of an African chief. A friend too is Jock Calderwood, the hospital pathologist, who shares with Hugh a devotion not only to medicine but to the sea and sailing. But no friend is David Lyell, the ambitious house physician whose actions are to threaten Hugh's future through Linda Masterson, only six years old, terrified and lonely in the children's ward.