[2] Helen (Nell) Irvine, daughter of the late Viscount Pevensey, has recently been married at the age of 18 to the significantly older Giles Merrion, Earl of Cardross, and has thus rescued her family from the impoverishment brought about by her father's gambling debts and then her brother’s irregular lifestyle.

Nell's brother Dysart is a drunken gambler whose wild behaviour places him on the shady side of the law.

She has fallen in love with the upright Jeremy Allandale, an aspiring diplomat who is soon to take up a position at the exiled Portuguese court in Brazil.

Cardross retrieves the necklace and, when Allandale brings the furious Letty back to Grosvenor Square, gives the couple permission to marry.

Jennifer Kloester conjectured in her biography that a Shakespearean reference is intended to the "men are April when they woo" speech in As You Like It.

[4] Later in the century the phrase figured as the title of a romantic novel by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford in 1890[5] and in the form "The April Lady" in a lyric by Helen Taylor (1876 - 1943), set by Helena M. Bland in 1917.

[6] Heyer's own estimate of her novel's story line was delivered in a letter to her friend Patricia Wallace: "This one is going to touch an All Time Low.