Hannah Francis has been forced to leave her beloved mother and the life she knows in the silk mill town of Macclesfield and is set to become an apprentice at a cotton mill in the Derbyshire dales. Hannah settles in well at the mill but finds it hard work. It is not long before Hannah attracts the eye of Edmund Critchlow, the man who owns them all body and soul - the man from who no pretty mill girl is safe.