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The setting is North Dormer, Massachusetts, a small town in the Berkshires, and neighboring Nettleton, in the early 1900s. The influential Lawyer Royall adopts the abused five-year-old Charity from the people of the mountain, and when she comes of age, he expresses his desire to marry her. Disliking her would-be husband, Charity turns down his advances. She meets the young architect Lucius Harney, newly arrived in town to visit his cousin Miss Hatchard. They fall in love, and the resulting affair leads to Charity's becoming pregnant. When she discovers that Lucius is engaged to the proper Ally Hawes, she runs off to the mountain to find her birth mother but arrives just to attend her mother's funeral. Realizing that she has no future as a single mother in the mountains, she agrees to wed Lawyer Royall and pens a farewell note to Lucius when she returns as a married woman.
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