Little Clare Hamilton is just nine years old when her childhood abruptly ends with the sudden death of both her parents in a typhoid epidemic. While her kind Aunt Polly takes her in, Clare longs to leave the cramped house in Belfast and return to the country. So she seizes the opportunity to return to Salter’s Grange and look after her grandfather who works as a blacksmith. At first tentative and awkward, the relationship between the old man and his granddaughter develops into a warm and loving bond that will sustain Clare through the years of her adolescence — as she grows into a lovely, intelligent young woman with the world at her feet.
