Fifteen-year-old Bertha Ryan leaves home to work as the hired girl in the troubled Corrigan household in a larger village, called the Cove. There, she is browbeaten by her employer and raped by the deranged son. Pregnant and terrified, Bertha marries her assailant's brother, with whom she is in love. But the war intervenes, and when her husband returns, he is shell-shocked and nothing is the same.