A village woman named Jenny and her neighbors are sketched through scenes of rural life and mounting crisis: train journeys, farmhouse and domestic scenes, market and social visits, and tense encounters with the local squire and gentry. Personal misfortunes—illness, betrayal, and a damaging fall—lead to despair, delirium, and fraught moral reckonings among family and friends. Bonds between Tim, Nat, Annie, and others are strained and reformed as events culminate in a night by the river, a revealing confession, and a final, subdued resolution that seeks to restore a fragile domestic peace.