In the story little Emily Byrd Starr, aged eleven, has been left an orphan. We are in time to see the death of her father, Douglas Starr, an unsuccessful journalist, and to learn that though he had never been forgiven for having eloped with Juliet Murray, yet the Murray pride is such that the family will certainly provide for Juliet's daughter. It is decided by the drawing of iots that she shall go to New Moon with two of her aunts. New Moon, called after the ship in which the Murrays sailed from the old country, had been built more than a century ago; the family had spread and, prospered, its tentacles were deep down in the island soil, so that we may watch the founding of a new squirearchy as well as obtain glimpses of many aspects of an ordered colonial life.