We see the public room of a small inn on a remote Cornish moor in January 1814, during a heavy blizzard of snow. Nightfall. Travellers from an overturned stagecoach seek shelter in the inn, followed soon after by a solicitor and his wife, and a runaway girl apprentice who had been travelling on a stage wagon. The tension is heightened when the employer of the apprentice arrives and there is a startling confrontation.