Sally accepts a last adventure before submitting to the strictures of upper-middle-class English female life. By the time she arrives in the East it is not long before the Sino-Japanese war begins to lap around the edges of the isolated and complacent western settlements. A move inland to Nanking restores the peace.

But only a few weeks pass before a disastrous miscalculation separates Sally from Hugh and leaves her trapped in the city, one of two dozen Europeans and Americans to witness the capture and sack of the Chinese capital by the Japanese Imperial Army. The experience is shared with Peter Moss, an American photo-journalist and friend of Hugh. Bystanders in a racial war, Sally and Peter emerge physically unscathed and return to the foreign settlements in Shanghai.