Dick Heldar is a war correspondent and an artist, well known for the drawings he sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious artist and re-encounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. He then learns that a minor problem with his eyes is actually the onset of an incurable blindness, the result of a head injury during the war. As his vision fails, the light of everything around him, his life, hopes, and dreams, fails with it. Terrible choices must be made between the love of a woman and the love of the men who stood by him at the front.

Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 in consideration of his power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.