A haunting story of love and mystery in Victorian England. In the late nineteenth century in the lush atmosphere of the English countryside at Saxelby Mill, the seafaring Captain Adam Westerdale had brought his frail bride and where a few years later he buried her. The distraught husband returned to sea, leaving behind him two young daughters, and except for his infrequent visits Lucy and Ellen Westerdale grew to the brink of womanhood happily but without their father's presence. Thus they lived in his absence and in their mother's shadowy memory, dreaming of the day that her girlhood companion, Cousin Rose, would come to them at last. And that May morning when they spied the beautiful young woman dressed in gray, standing lost and alone at the mill gate, was the day it all began. Rose had come and touched their lives and nothing would ever be the same again.