Elizabeth Cunningham was seventeen years old when Adam Montgomery came back to his father's house, and on that day Elizabeth's life was changed for ever. An orphanage girl, she kept house for the domineering Rab Montgomery and his sons Matthew and James. Now his third son Adam had returned, and he had no intention of kowtowing to his father's demands to enter the family shawl manufacturing business. For Adam was a doctor and, in early nineteenth century Paisley with the dread scourge of cholera not far away, every doctor was needed. Something else kept him in Paisley; the lovely Helen Grant.