Nearly a hundred years after the events of The Löwensköld Ring, the curse still seems to hang over the descendants of this family. In the village of Korskyrka, Värmland, Charlotte Löwensköld and Karl Artur Ekenstedt, both descendants of related branches of the Löwensköld family, are engaged.
The latter, from a good family and cherished by his mother, who had great ambitions for him, has become a poor, assistant pastor in the parish. He is drawn into a pietistic spiritualist drift, leading to erratic renunciations, supported in his ideas by Thea Sundler, the wife of the organist.
She, who is the daughter of Malvina Spack, a character from The Löwensköld Ring, is secretly in love with the young man. Her machinations succeed, and Karl Artur breaks off his engagement with Charlotte and chooses as his future wife the first woman he meets on his path, Anna Svärd, an illiterate Dalarna peddler — convinced that by doing so, he is surrendering to God and embarking on a life of renunciation and evangelical poverty.
Meanwhile, Charlotte is reluctantly and almost inevitably drawn into a more serious commitment to marry the wealthy Schagerström, whom she does not love. Thanks to Thea’s slanders, she becomes the target of public condemnation for abandoning the poor pastor and pursuing a marriage of convenience.
A vivid portrayal of the social life of a Värmland village in the first half of the 19th century, caught between industrialization and peasant traditions.