Set in picturesque coastal Cornwall, in a tight-knit fishing village in the 1930s, two sisters, Ursula and Janet Widdington, discover Andrea, a handsome and gifted young Polish violinist from Crakow, on the beach below their house when he is swept overboard by a storm while he is travelling to America. The sisters nurse him back to health, but the presence of the young man disrupts the peaceful lives of them and the community in which they live.