Elderly narrator Harry Langton looks back on the adventures and friends of his youth, transporting the reader to the Scottish Borderlands at the end of the 16th century... The much younger Langton returns to his birthplace to aid an old friend, the brash Adam Fleming, who has fallen for legendary beauty Helen of Annandale. He has also, it seems, fallen foul of a rival for her hand, Robert Bell, a man as violent as he is influential. Fleming confesses...