The lonely Maine seacoast town of Hawkesbury was very different from the big Boston hospital where Mavis Eaton had been serving as a nurse. Yet it was giving her an undreamed of opportunity to indulge her second talent — painting — for a whole year without interruption. In fact, the elderly patient who had offered to subsidize Mavis had made concentration on her art for twelve months one of the conditions of the grant. And when she died at the start of the experiment, Mavis found that her will still took care of the situation.

So the nurse settled down to her seascapes and landscapes. Unfortunately, some sinister developments concerning suspected spies and other unhealthy characters soon diverted Mavis and made the preservation of her own life her chief preoccupation.