From Fighting Front to Home Front. A troubled Adam Springer, Heinrich Mueller's grandson, returns from the Civil War to the family farm in Ohio. Bedeviled by the memory of battlefields red with the mingled blood of north and south, nightmares and melancholy plague him. One image Adam holds dear-the lovely young woman he watched descend the stairs of a grand Atlanta home before it gave into flames spread by the Yankee hoard. Rejecting the come hither glances of local farm girls, Adam seeks a woman of similar beauty and grace and finds her in eighteen-year old Martha. She leaves her elegant Marietta home to join Adam in the shabby house on the lonely farm where his mother, Lizzie, reigns as queen. The marriage is stormy, children arrive, children die, and Martha-her girlish essence transformed to steel-takes their sons and leaves to run a hotel. Was it possible for Adam to change? Could he win her back? Did he even want to? The fledgling Ohio pottery industry provides a subplot to this story of two lovers as they work through domestic mistreatment and family tragedy.