After spending nearly four uneasy decades in her ancestral England and accompanied by her dead sister's daughter Camilia, Grace returns to the cantonment township of Mhow where she had spent a much-cossetted childhood and youth in her parents' establishment called Chinnery's Hotel. The fictional Mhow, with its polo tournaments, tent-pegging, ballroom dances, Masonic Lodge and whist drives serves as a prototype of cantonments between the wars, where the resident British live in appalling ignorance of the political realities which would dislodge and transplant them to war-ravaged England in 1947.The bleak post-war life in London feeds Grace's nostalgia for her childhood home.