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. Then he 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.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, India. At seventeen Kipling began work as a journalist and over the next seven years established an international reputation with his stories and verses of Indian and Army life. Kipling and his wife, Caroline, settled in Sussex, England, and he continued to travel extensively. In 1907, he became the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize.