When 19-year-old student Emma Tarrant meets Dominic Delavale, a Royal Navy sub-lieutenant, who also happens to be a brilliant pianist, her conviction that "love at first sight" is only for storybooks flies out of the window. But the love that they believe will last forever is destroyed by another woman's jealousy. Dominic's life, too, is devastated by tragedy, and a fatal misunderstanding finally tears their lives apart. In the following six years, both of them attempt to build separate new lives, until fate brings them together again. But now circumstances are very different, and a happy ending is not even on the horizon. Dominic is no longer a naval officer, and Emma knows that he needs belief and encouragement to achieve his life's ambition, but giving him that help also means giving up the one thing she wants more than anything else in the world. Will her sacrifice be in vain?