The action takes place in Battle Hill, outside London, amidst the townspeople&#39;s staging of a new play by Peter Stanhope. The hill seems to reside at the crux of time, as characters from the past appear, and perhaps at a doorway to the beyond, as characters are alternately summoned heavenwards or descend into hell.<br /><br />Pauline Anstruther, the heroine of the novel, lives in fear of meeting her own doppelg&auml;nger, which has appeared to her throughout her life. But Stanhope, in an action central to the author&#39;s own theology, takes the burden of her fears upon himself&mdash;Williams called this The Doctrine of Substituted Love&mdash;and enables Pauline, at long last, to face her true self. Williams drew this idea from the biblical verse, &quot;Ye shall bear one another&#39;s burdens&quot;<br /><br />And so Stanhope does take the weight, with no surreptitious motive, in the most affecting scene in the novel. And Pauline, liberated, is able to accept truth.<br /><br />On the other hand, Lawrence Wentworth, a local historian, finding his desire for Adela Hunt to be unrequited, falls in love instead with a spirit form of Adela, which seems to represent a kind of extreme self-love on his part. As he isolates himself more and more with this insubstantial figure, and dreams of descending a silver rope into a dark pit, Wentworth begins the descent into Hell.