Franz von Heiden, son of a Nazi official and an English mother, comes to England in 1938 to visit his cousins and study them. He is welcomed by Wynne Braithwaite's family and friends and finds their casual talk and happy life at odds with what he was taught. Falling in love with Wynne, Franz is troubled by memories of his mother's broken life in Germany. As events move from Munich and Czechoslovakia to war, his dilemma deepens and he must make a devastating choice.

A direct sequel following the young Scottish protagonist after his earlier adventures, this novel traces his struggle to secure his rightful inheritance and to find his place in a politically charged society while falling in love with a spirited Highland girl; drawn into the troubled fate of an exiled man with ties to the Jacobite cause, he must navigate betrayals, courtroom battles, shipboard danger, and tests of honor and friendship that force him to grow from boy to man.

An 18th-century coming-of-age adventure following a young Lowland Scotsman who, cheated out of his inheritance by a treacherous kinsman, is set adrift and swept into a series of dangerous escapades. Marooned among Jacobite Highlanders, he forms a wary friendship with a charismatic fugitive, survives shipwreck and pursuit, and becomes entangled in the era’s bitter politics and legal intrigues. Returning to the courts and respectable society, he must struggle to recover his rights, defend his companion, and navigate a testing romance, learning hard lessons about loyalty, honor, and identity along the way.

Published in the United States as Mountain Meadow, the book was released posthumously in 1941. Buchan drew on his 1937 voyage down the Mackenzie River as Governor-General of Canada to describe the rugged Northwest Territories. Sir Edward Leithen, a lawyer and politician given a year to live after a diagnosis of advanced tuberculosis, agrees to help an American colleague, John S. Blenkiron, search for the colleague's niece's husband who has left a successful financial career for the Canadian north.