After Desford learns that the latest of Hetta's admirers is Mr. Cary Nethercott, he visits her family home of Inglehurst and meets the man, whom he pronounces appropriate but immensely dull.

She is almost nineteen years old, but is being used as an unpaid servant by the aunt and cousins with whom she has lived since her father abandoned her and failed to pay the bill at her boarding school in Bath.

Desford later encounters Cherry running away from home and, against his better judgment, he makes himself responsible for her welfare and takes her to her grandfather's house in London.

Cherry is finally discovered out in the country with a sprained ankle by Nethercott, who carries her home, having proposed marriage to her and been accepted.

A Publishers Weekly review of Charity Girl describes it as "full of dashing period slang, and it trifles with the affairs of several maids and men with such style and gentle irony that readers of good 'ton,' as Miss Heyer herself might put it, will find reading it a very 'comfortable cose' indeed.

"[2] Beyond that, Charity Girl has not received a lot of serious critical attention, but it does continue to garner a steady trickle of readers, especially fans of the regency genre.