Seven travelers set out at dawn along the coast to inspect ruins, and amid the sleepy company an elderly painter announces he will tell of his saddest love. He recalls his youth as a wandering landscape artist, savoring transient rural affairs, intimate encounters in fields and barns, and the ecstatic communion with nature that shaped his senses and work. Arriving at a small cliffside hamlet, he boards at a modest farmhouse run by a mistrustful hostess and notes another lodger, an elderly English-style woman, before the narrative turns to the passionate, tragic attachment he endured.