In which the diligent Marty South toils through the night to prepare bundles of thatching spars for her ailing father’s work, all the while marked by quiet sacrifices and secret anxieties that gently reveal the shifting undercurrents of village life. Meanwhile, concerns about her future and the complex hopes harboured by the timber-merchant Melbury unfold with an air of restrained melancholy, as the dawn creeps softly over the woodlands and those who dwell within them.