Brought together by friendship, torn apart by love... Meg Hughes, Tom Fraser and Martin Hunter were friends who 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 to separate them. As time passes, Meg grows more and more beautiful, and the love the two men feel for her becomes passionately possessive. Meg, in different ways, 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 the childhood friends' deep and complex relationships are finally and tragically resolved.