The Christmas holiday is fraught with a lot of miracles. Could Katie Lyman, a modest translator and admirer of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels, have suspected that one fine day the door of her house would open and Lord Daniel Costain, a man unraveling the machinations of the Bonapartists, who urgently needed to translate a secret document of national importance, would emerge from the snowy swirl. So Ketty found herself drawn into a whirlpool of incredible, sometimes deadly events, the denouement of which came during the Great Winter Ball, given on Christmas Eve in one of the most luxurious high-society salons in London.