After the death of his father, the 5th Viscount Lynton, in a riding accident, twenty-six-year-old Captain Adam Deveril is summoned home from his regiment in the closing year of the Peninsular War.

Oversley suggests that Adam listen instead to the proposal of his friend Mr Jonathan Chawleigh, an extremely wealthy city merchant, who wishes his daughter Jenny to marry into the aristocracy.

Having followed the news of Napoleon’s exile and return, his own past involvement in the army leads Adam to the conviction that Wellington will not lose, so instead of taking his father-in-law's advice to sell his stocks, he buys when prices are low and makes his fortune.

Jennifer Clement compares the novel to The Convenient Marriage (1934), Friday's Child (1944) and April Lady (1957) in this respect as "a reverse romance…where the central pair begin by getting married and end by realising their love for one another".

This particular theme culminates in the depiction of the "Waterloo panic" through which Adam keeps his nerve and relies on private experience of a military kind, enabling him to recoup his fortune in the end, with the aid of a loan from Drummonds Bank.

Upper-class climbing, in which the material interests of his family are neglected, in the case of the 5th Lord Lynton and his interaction with the set about the Prince Regent, compares with Jonathan Chawleigh's balancing his business acumen with his extravagant devotion to his daughter's welfare.

[6] The timeline upon which the progress of the plot depends, covering the seventeen months from the end of January 1814 to June 1815, comes to its grand finale in the confused reactions and financial panic in Britain during Napoleon's invasion of Belgium, from which Adam ultimately profits.

[9] But another fashion of the time is put to farcical use in describing the homecoming of the honeymooning couple to Lynton House, which Mr Chawleigh, mistaking opulence for elegance, has had redecorated for them in neoclassical style and with 'Egyptian' furnishings.

These include "couches with crocodile legs…lyre-backed chairs, footstools on lion-legs and several candelabra on pedestals entwined with lotus and anthemion garlands", not to mention a bath in the shape of a shell that is greeted by the normally quiet Jenny with shouts of laughter.