The great Scottish historian, Carlisle, said "history is a distillation of rumour". However, a contradictory quote is, "where there's smoke, there's fire". Whichever may be true of the Monkton family, gossip had marked them as a family damned by hereditary insanity. Every single kind of insanity had cropped up through the years, monomania, being the most common. The world of the Monkton family subsequently shrank to almost nobody, except for the Elmsleys, friends and neighbours...