DesirЋe rolled her sparkling eyes up to the handsome face of her sweetheart Mark. When they had decided to announce their engagement it had been a surprise for everyone, including her parents, though she had known that they could only approve. They liked Mark, loved Mark, and they had been overjoyed that their only daughter had found such a fine young man to marry. DesirЋe had really been in no hurry to get married. Her education in music had been more important to her in Chicago, but her straight-laced parents, her father in particular, had panicked when a friend of hers, of a somewhat disreputable aspect, had shown up at the door of their mansion asking for his darling, pristine daughter.

Father, now very rich and in a position to be an absentee director of his corporate law firm, quickly moved the family to his distant country farm where DesirЋe would be safe from the influence of modern society. The fact was that DesirЋe was his only child, his beautiful wife having lost her reproductive powers through a medical accident during her second abortive pregnancy, and Thurston Mitchell had no intention of losing his one and only daughter to modern decadence.

DesirЋe, for her part, had at first complained, albeit meekly, about having to leave her friends and her precious university studies. After all, she was barely into her sophomore year and now she was torn away from all her plans for the future. She had never been close to any boy, never in love, and her music and literature courses helped her compensate for the emotional emptiness in her life. And so coming to Pickford's Meadows had seemed like the end of her world.