The setting is the old family home to which Cousin Laura came as a June bride sixty years ago. Today, history repeats itself, for Ellen is about to marry Cousin Laura's step-son, Leonard, after a seven-year engagement. But Ellen is uneasy about the approaching wedding.
While smoothing the familiar friction among the tenants who now inhabit most of the old house, Ellen tries to attribute her qualms to a spinsterish imagination. But at night, awakened by sounds that remind her of childhood terror, her fears become more and more interwoven with Cousin Laura's unhappy memories of her first marriage. The old woman's outworn bitterness seems to have some mysterious relevance to Leonard's odd behaviour as the marriage preparations go forward.
The forebodings of the two women--the very old and the very young--become spine-tingling reality on the night of the wedding.