[3] Lizzie Greystock, a fortune-hunter, ensnares the sickly, dissipated Sir Florian Eustace and is soon left a very wealthy widow and mother.

Meanwhile, after a respectable period of mourning, Lizzie searches for another husband, a dashing "Corsair" more in keeping with her extravagantly romantic fantasies.

She becomes engaged to an honourable, but dull politician, Lord Fawn, but they have a falling out when her character becomes better known, especially her determination to keep the diamonds.

She then considers her cousin, Frank Greystock, even though he is already engaged to Lucy Morris, a poor but much beloved governess of the Fawn daughters.

Another more Corsair-like possibility is one of the guests at her Scottish home, the older Lord George de Bruce Carruthers, a man who supports himself in a somewhat mysterious manner.

Among the other guests is a young woman named Lucinda Roanoke, whose financially straitened aunt, Mrs Carbuncle, is desperate to marry her off.

As it turns out, Lizzie had taken the gems out and put them under her pillow, but acting on her first instincts, she perjures herself when she has to report the theft to the magistrate, thinking that she can sell the diamonds and let the robbers take the blame.

In the end, the diamonds are lost, the police discover the truth, and Lizzie is forced to confess her lies, though she escapes legal retribution since her testimony is needed to convict the criminals.

As such, popular perception of the novel places it somewhat separately from the rest of the Palliser sequence, focusing as it does primarily on a new set of characters.