A country gentleman returns one night to his isolated and unforgiving home with a gypsy child tucked under his cloak. Treated as an animal, the child Heathcliff grows up twisted and wild. But he and the daughter of the house, Catherine, are inseparable and love each other like they were one being. When they grow up and Catherine wishes to enter the society which Heathcliff cannot, the lives of everyone around them are destroyed in the rending. Only the generation to follow them contains the seeds of hope and reconstruction.