An elderly narrator recounts how his life became entangled with a local family and with a young woman named Lucy, tracing events back to an ancestral manor in a remote Lancashire valley. He sketches the house and its decayed estate, the Starkeys' steadfast Roman Catholicism, the return of the squire accompanied by an Irish wife, and the household's blend of old loyalties and impoverishment. The narrative weaves reconstructed family history, local atmosphere, and the narrator's own origins and eventual involvement, touching on memory, religious allegiance, social decline, and the long shadows of past choices.