Elfrida Swann, a struggling artist known to everyone as Freddie, is about to get married. Preparations for the great day — arranged with magnificent extravagance by her smart stepmother in the hope of inciting bitter envy among her acquaintances — are in hand. The bouquets are made up, the cake decorated, the page boys rehearsed. Then, two days before the wedding, Freddie — a byword among her friends for common sense and dependability — decides she can't go through with it.
Unable to face the fury and anguish of her fiance, her parents and just about everyone else she knows, Freddie runs away to a friend's cottage in Dorset. At first sight, Drop Cottage looks so dilapidated that Freddie feels she can't possibly stay, but she soon falls under the spell of its idiosyncratic charms. The attentions of Guy from the 'big house', the friendship of the eccentric and beguiling Prim, a family of neglected children, a clergyman with 'doubts', and the ravishing beauty of the countryside all conspire to bewitch Freddie and, ultimately, reveal the workings of her own mind and heart.