An ill-fate lady's love story......

The protagonist of this book is He Mengxia, a primary school teacher. He lived in the home of a distant relative, Cui Shi, and also served as a tutor of his family. Cui Shi has a widowed daughter-in-law, Bai Liying, who was born in a big family. Her son, Peng Lang, was learning from He Mengxia. He Mengxia and Bai Liying fell in love from admiration. However, this was a love that was doomed to be hopeless. Due to her frustration, Bai Liying introduced her sister-in-law Junqian to He Mengxia and forced them to marry by using "the scheme of grafting trees and removing flowers, and the scheme of replacing a plum with a dead peach".

Bai Liying felt sorry for her dead husband. On one hand, she killed herself in order to cut off He Mengxia's feelings for herself. Junqian was a new woman trained by the school. She yearned for free marriage, and was not satisfied with her widowed sister-in-law's arrangement for her marriage. Later, she found out the love between Bai Liying and He Mengxia. She felt that she had killed Bai Liying, so she killed herself. He Mengxia also wanted to die for love, but thought that as a man he should die for state affairs, so he went abroad to study and participated in the Wuchang Uprising after returning home to die for her country.