Autumn 1919. In a Swiss spa town, Elizabeth Mortlake, companion to her widowed sister-in-law, meets Jameson and Hunter, ex-officers striving for some new measure of peace and order amid the ever-lengthening shadows of the First World War. One is hospitalized awaiting court-marital, the other seeks a more personal atonement for his unimaginable sins. In mourning herself, Elizabeth is drawn increasingly into their lives, gradually understanding how fragile is the peace they each inhabit and how the bonds and ideals which once sustained them now threaten to destroy them completely.
