Meg Hughes, Tom Fraser and Martin Hunter had grown up together in the grinding poverty of a Liverpool orphanage. Their prospects looked bleak until the friends were sent to help out at Hemingway Shipping Line’s emigrant lodging house. Then their youthful high spirits blossomed into their plans for the future. But the First World War brought an end to those plans, and threatened them with divisions, their greatest fear, for childhood ties are not easily broken. As time passes, Meg grows more and more beautiful, and the love the two men feel for her becomes passionately possessive, while Meg, in a different way, is in love with both Tom and Martin… and is to bear a child by one of them. Grief and suffering, as well as happiness and hope, must all play their part before their deep and complex relationships are finally and tragically resolved.