Sarah and Beattie Melford have never understood each other. Beattie, raucous and fun-loving, sees her sister Sarah's quiet reserve as snobbery, and Sarah cannot understand why Beattie appears to upset their parents' comfortable Islington household at every opportunity. When Sarah discovers her younger sister's spiteful affair with the naval officer she'd hoped to marry, she is devastated, whilst the defiant Beattie's reputation lies in tatters. As London recovers from the trauma of the Great War the girls are forced into very different lives. But, through the child they both love, it seems there might be a chance that the tragedy that drove them apart might one day compel their paths to cross again...