About to leave her school, the Five Oaks Boarding School for Young Ladies, the beautiful but penniless Rosilda Harvey is told by her unsympathetic Guardian that she must take a junior teacher’s job at the school and not come and live with her in the Lake District as she had hoped. Very depressed at her uncertain future, she is unexpectedly offered a position by Sir Andrew Dexter, a handsome but autocratic official of the British Foreign Office, who suddenly appears unannounced at the school.