Widowed by Ireland's Great Famine, Ellen Rua O'Malley flees her native land for Boston and the New World: with her are her two surviving children, Patrick and Mary, and the 'silent girl' whom Ellen has found wandering among the hordes of the dispossessed. In Boston awaits the man who loves her, Lavelle, and the hope and stability which she craves: but is shaking off the Old World, its customs, its language, the answer she believes it to be? Or is she destined to be caught between past and present, between two loves? When a man from her past reappers it seems that her own conflict can only lead to a fall from grace.