On the bus from Dublin to a country town named Sallygap, a middle-aged man named Manny Ryan talks to his fellow passenger about his past. When he was younger, he played with a street band in the city that once got the opportunity to move to Paris. He was boarding the boat to leave when he saw his girlfriend at the time, Annie, watching and waving goodbye sadly. To his bandmates’ dismay, he gets off the boat to stay with her, but forgets his fiddle on board. One of his friends throws him the fiddle as the boat pulls away, but it falls and shatters onto the docks. Now, he’s married to Annie and they run a small shop in Dublin, and Manny is headed to Sallygap to secure a weekly egg delivery. As he leaves the bus, he cautions the younger passenger to leave for Paris while he can. In Sallygap, Manny easily gets the deal with the egg seller and then goes to a bar to wait for the next bus. In the bar, a talkative traveler annoys him so greatly that he skips the bus when he finds out they would be on the same one. Instead, Manny walks back down to Dublin, and the surrounding nature excites him so much that he swears to return to the hills again. When he finally sees the city, though, the tiredness of the past miles immediately exhausts him and he heads home in a fearful daze of Annie’s wrath when he returns late. He enters the house, but she remains silent by the dark fire. In truth, she had been excited about his unexpected absence because their marriage had been monotonous for so long. She often began fights to see if she could finally push him to break his kind, gentle demeanor with her, and got excited hearing about other women’s sexual relationships or angry husbands. When it began to get later and later, though, she started to fear that he had died or gotten hurt. His eventual return disappoints her when she realizes he is the same person who left. They talk about his trip to Sallygap as he eats a cold dinner and she inserts occasional barbs into the conversation. In the end he realizes he cannot escape her hatred for him even in the countryside hills; he fears that one day she may act on her anger and kill him.