Love's Harvest

In the wake of a stepfather’s last gasp, Jane Day—half-feral songbird of the prairie—finds herself bequeathed like a parcel of heirloom seed to Jim Atherton, a citified heir whose cufflinks gleam harder than his conscience. The arrival of Jim and his porcelain fiancée detonates Jane’s sense of tenancy; she bolts, canine shadow in tow, toward the electric dusk of the metropolis where marquees blink like cheap cathedrals. Allen Hamilton—impresario with a carnation in his lapel and melancholy tucked behind the smile—discovers her warbling on a stoop, recognizes the tremolo of unmined gold, and purchases her future with a steamship ticket to Paris, city of phosphorescent rain. Across the Atlantic, Jane’s voice unfurls in Montmartre garrets while Jim—suddenly conscience-struck—materializes among the fog-soft boulevards. Love ignites inside a mirror-maze of guilt and desire. Hamilton, hearing his own heart for the first time, presses his suit; Jane, indebted and breathless, balances on the fulcrum between gratitude and pulse. In the final cadence, Hamilton cedes the stage, a maestro extinguishing his own spotlight so the lovers can exit into a dawn the color of unfinished chords.