Basil, younger son of an old family whose father prizes its lineage above everything, glimpses Margaret Sherwin on an omnibus and is lost. He marries her in secret on her father’s condition that the union stay unconsummated for a year — and then the mysterious clerk Mannion returns to the Sherwin household. Told as the hero’s own confession, the novel grew from a real incident Collins knew.
Collins’s first contemporary novel, a lurid and startling early sensation story. Download the free EPUB.