Eight youngsters are cut off by the East Anglian floods in a farmhouse with no grown-ups to help them. The story tells how they deal with the situation until they are rescued.
In the 19th century a group of children is mixed up in local smuggling thinking it is just an exciting game. But they find out how serious it is and help to round up the villains.
After falling in love with an American woman, Virginia Killain, who is engaged to another man, British Naval Commander Max Easton, hatches a plan that will get him enough money to support Virginia in the lifestyle she is accustomed to. Easton's plan is to disappear for a time making it seem that he has defected to the Soviets taking important Naval secrets from his job at the Admiralty and to return and sue the newspapers for slander. Not everything goes as planned for Commander Easton.
Marcelle de Barthas is young French widow, who since her husband’s death some seven years previously, has lived a secluded life in her country house, with her four children. The eldest one, Emmy, is a beautiful and pure young girl of seventeen, who tentatively believes she has a calling to the religious life. The second child, Bertrand, aged fifteen, has been sent to England for an exchange holiday with a young English boy, Harry Fanning, and when the play opens, the French children are excitedly awaiting his arrival. Also living with the family is a French governess, and a tutor, Blaise Lebel. Lebel has a sombre power over the family, and it is the ‘intrusion’ of Harry that sets in motion in him a wave of resentment and fear.