Captain Frederick Wentworth has learnt to his cost that he loves Anne Elliot and always has: though it took the threat of losing her to illness and then to another suitor for him to realise the truth of his feelings. When he is invited, with his brother Edward, to spend Christmas in Somerset with his sister, he is delighted to find Anne will be spending the season with her own sister, in nearby Uppercross, rather than at Bath as he had assumed...