Beautiful and bewitching Tilly Trotter has served Mark Sop with devotedly for twelve years--his wife in all but name. But now his is dead and Tilly's whole future at Highfield Manor looks uncertain. Four months pregnant with Mark's child, Tilly's predicament is worsened by the hostility of his oldest grown-up child, Jessie Ann, who is determined to have Tilly banished from the Manor... No stranger to hardship and trouble, brave and young Matilda is destined to leave her native Tyneside for a strange and distant land--following her heart to America, where great peril awaits her...