The Battle of Life

Doctor Jeddler treats the world as a joke not worth taking seriously, and raises his two daughters, Grace and Marion, on an old battlefield where thousands died and the grass grew back over it anyway.

Marion is promised to Alfred Heathfield. On the day he returns to claim her, she is gone, and nobody can say where or why. Six years pass. Grace marries Alfred in her sister's place, and the household settles into a shape nobody chose.

Then Marion comes back with an explanation, and it turns out that everything that looked like abandonment was arranged, deliberately and at her own cost.

The fourth of Charles Dickens's five Christmas books, published in 1846, subtitled A Love Story. It is the least read of the five, and the only one with nothing supernatural in it.