On his way across the Mediterranean to Italy, Martin Boyne meets the seven Wheater children traveling with their governess and nanny. Their parents are friends of Boyne’s from college. Boyne is an engineer who has worked in many parts of the world. He is on his way to see Rose Sellars, a woman he loves whose husband has recently died. Boyne befriends the Wheater children and undertakes to protect them from the uncertainties of their life with parents whose divorces and remarriages keep them unsettled. His remarkable and somewhat inexplicable relationship with the children turns his life inside out and upside down.
