The book begins: The kitchen door stood open wide, and the breath from the meadow blew freshly across Joyce Radway's hot cheeks and forehead as she passed hurriedly back and forth from the kitchen stove to the dining room table preparing the evening meal. It had been a long-hard day and she was very tired. The tears seemed to have been scorching her eyelids since early morning, and because her spirit would not let them out they seemed to have been flowing back into her heart till its beating was almost stopped by the deluge. Somehow it had been the hardest day in all the two weeks since her aunt died; the culmination of all the hard times since Aunt Mary had been taken sick and her son Eugene Massey brought his wife and two children home to live.