How must a mother and son greet the unexpected homecoming of an estranged husband and father? In the summer of 1949, Helen and Dan Mehring decide to take Will Mehring’s fresh avowals of love on faith. Still bereaved by the death of her young daughter, the tragedy whose impact on their marriage provoked Will’s flight from their small Pennsylvania town six years before, Helen accepts his reappearance as a signal from fate, one perhaps fraught with peril. Dan, at twenty, is overcome with gladness. Will hopes for the best but does so guiltily. Drawn home by a renewed vow to mend his broken family, he has abandoned Alma Atkins, a beautiful war widow living in a village in West Virginia, with whom he’d rebuilt his life. Though Helen acknowledges her husband’s sincerity, Will fails to reverse her withdrawal from the daily pleasures of love and family. Dan leaves home in the hope of tracing his father’s separate life in West Virginia. Alma takes him in, and he falls in love with Sue, her spirited daughter. Complications ensue.