While following his obsessive search for an intriguing orphan girl he met ten years earlier, a seventeenth-century Dutch youth struggles with a mystifying, rare, natural gift. He hopes to find a way to use the gift to improve the world somehow, but is also tempted to use it for personal gain. As the gift threatens to raise suspicion and isolate him from others, he worries that the revelation of the gift to the woman he loves may frighten her away. Or will she instead find it fascinating and endearing?
