Ralph Warriner, a captain in the Royal Artillery, is stationed in the British garrison at Gibraltar, where he lives with his young wife Miranda whom he had married when she was 18.

Luke Charnock, a young railway engineer, is introduced to Miranda, still aged only 24, at a dinner at her cousin's home in London two years later, and both remember having briefly seen each other once before.

Miranda is blackmailed by 'Major' Ambrose Wilbraham, who knows not only that Ralph Warriner had been dismissed for selling British secrets to a foreign power, but also that his death was faked and that he is still alive and engaged in illegal gun-running into Morocco.

In Tangier, Ralph Warriner is kidnapped by a blind moor named Hassan Akbar whom he had earlier betrayed, and is sold into slavery in the Moroccan interior.

His friend, the wealthy Belgian Claude Fournier – who is Warriner's gun-running business partner – asks Miranda to arrange a rescue bid.

"[3] Writing in 1952, Mason's biographer Roger Lancelyn Green thought it a most readable story, excellently written and well put-together, but rather like a very pleasant dream that one really can't remember in the morning.

He noted that Mason "broadly hints" at his purpose to make sure that readers would not miss the allusions,[6] and that he gives his characters multiple Homeric roles in the manner of the later Ulysses.

[8] Finally, he noted that Miranda appears to be the only literary work known to Joyce that was set in Victorian Gibraltar, and from which he derived some of the scenes of Molly Bloom's recollections in Ulysses.