In 1844 Greenwich, Connecticut, Miranda Wells, a farm girl raised by strait-laced low church parents, often daydreams of a romantic and luxurious life.

Miranda's mother receives a letter from their distant cousin Nicholas Van Ryn, a wealthy patroon in Hudson, New York.

Servants claim the Van Ryn bloodline is cursed as only they can hear a harpsichord played by an ancestral ghost whenever misfortune befalls the family.

Nicholas grudgingly agrees to Turner's request that the farmer be given a fair trial, in return for which he insists the doctor attend to his ailing wife, Johanna.

Nicholas is thrilled when Miranda becomes pregnant soon after the wedding, but they quarrel over her simple faith in a God as the semi-feudal system of patroon land ownership and tenancy crumbles around him.

An increasingly volatile and dangerous Nicholas grabs a pistol and goes to the Kermesse grounds in an attempt to revive patroonal authority by restoring old rituals of tenancy.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said: "... Twentieth Century-Fox has fashioned a grand and gloomy mansion as the scene, and has inhabited it with a haughty master of aristocratic Dutch descent.

Gene Tierney is fairly ornamental in the role of the tortured child bride, but she plainly creates no more character than the meager script provides.

[10] It was dramatized as a half-hour radio play on the January 20, 1947, broadcast of The Screen Guild Theater, starring Vincent Price and Teresa Wright.