The Shores of Home — Mary Frances Doner

It was in desperation that Edith Finchley wrote to her niece, Charlotte Broward, in New York. Not once had Charlotte returned to Ashmont, the Finchley mansion in Braves Landing, where she had been raised by her aunt. She had left Canada immediately after her high school graduation, choosing to live among strangers rather than to suffer the company of the aunt who herself had described Charlotte as a burden. And there had been the abrupt disaffection of Ian Macrae, her girlhood sweetheart, when Charlotte's vagabond father had made a startling and embarrassing appearance in Braves Landing that week of graduation.

Now circumstances impelled Edith Finchley to invite Charlotte home. Ashmont, the family citadel for over a century, and all Miss Finchley had left in the world, was to be demolished, a victim of the St. Lawrence Seaway Project, when the waters of that river would sweep over thirty-seven miles of Ontario shore, immolating homes and hearts to progress. Already the aluminum tag had been nailed to Ashmont, numbering its days, and Miss Finchley's new home, in the new, relocated Braves Landing, was under construction. If Charlotte wanted to see her girlhood home again, she must come at once--

On a longing to see the old, the familiar, Charlotte Broward did come home - to face change: Ashmont and the town itself going; Edith Finchley, the stern disciplinarian of her youth, aging and mellowed; Ian Macrae caught up in a strange misalliance; and everywhere the Seaway Project - the mighty force that, inexorably, would shape the destinies of both Charlotte and her aunt.