When seventeen-year-old Mary O'Connor collapses in church she is taken to live with Dr Roberts and his wife in a beautiful Yorkshire village, where she becomes the daughter they were never able to have, . With Britain at war, she works in the local steel works but when her fiancé Tom Downing is killed, a grief-stricken Mary is convinced it is retribution for their night of sin during Tom's Christmas leave. Eventually Mary marries local miner Jack Holmes, and sets up her own dressmaking business, but the business starts to dominate her life until tragedy once more threatens to destroy all she most cherishes.