Sara needs all her tact and understanding to help a bright, but introverted, student from the East adjust to his new surroundings, but his father's talent for making enemies threatens to make the task impossible.

When Sara tries to attract two farm boys to her school, she finds herself becoming worried about their mother, a troubled woman of obvious breeding who left a cultured life in the East to raise a family on the frontier far from other people. lnga Swenson guest stars as Henrietta Lindquist, who is wasting away from years of desolation in an earthen house far from town, until Sara lures her into Independence to hear music for the first time in years.