That evening, Chris goes out and saws off the broken part of the tree, leaving a stump. His mother doesn’t like that he’s doing it with his good coat on but nevertheless offers him some of the grape beverage she made for George. Impatiently, he asks her why his father is still asleep. Explaining that Joe sleeps when he’s worried, Kate begs her son to protect his parents. Though Chris tells her there’s nothing to be afraid of, Kate frets that the courts will open up the case against Joe again. She is concerned that the whole family hates the Kellers, even Annie, but Chris tells her not to worry about Annie and to stop talking about it.

When Annie enters, Kate quickly leaves. The two lovers discuss when they are going to tell Kate that they are engaged. Annie, like everyone else in the household, is highly anxious. Chris goes inside, leaving Annie looking at the tree. 

Caught by surprise when Sue walks up looking for her husband, Annie jumps and feels foolish. She then tells Sue that Jim went to pick up George. Slyly, Sue jokes around with Annie about marrying Chris, making personal comments about her choices. Then, getting to the point, she asks Annie to take Chris away when she marries him, telling her that Jim will be unhappy as long as Chris is around, because Chris makes him feel that he has given up on his higher aspirations. When Annie resists these comments, Sue insinuates that Chris taking a paycheck from his father’s business is incriminating because of the factory’s past history. The conversation grows more tense, with Annie becoming increasingly stiff and Sue ranting about the Kellers making her family look bad. 

Chris comes back. When he sees Sue, he asks her to go try to calm Kate down. Talking about Sue, Chris praises her nursing skills. This makes Annie angry because she now knows that Sue hates Chris, and she tells him as much. Hesitantly, Annie questions once more whether the business is still corrupt, and Chris affirms that he wouldn’t participate if there were anything wrong with it. They kiss. 

At this point, Joe comes in, and the three begin to banter. Then Joe grows serious, asking Annie if she will talk to George about the possibility of Joe’s setting him up in the town. His reasoning is that Chris is his only accomplishment, and he wants their father to be able to feel that George and Annie are secure. Then he brings up a more surprising possibility: he would offer their father a job when he gets out of prison. The proposal angers Annie and Chris, which upsets Joe because he thinks Annie should have more family feeling and reverence for her father. After yelling at Annie, though, he apologizes. Lydia arrives, and she, too, is sent up to care for Kate. 

Without George, Jim enters. He tells Chris that he has left George in the car. For Kate’s sake, he says, they cannot bring George into the house. Instead, Chris should take George somewhere else and try to talk him out of his plan to take Annie away. Before they can make a plan, George enters. Chris, Annie, and George have a tense catching-up chat, with some needling of one another. Then the real topic emerges. George insists that Annie cannot marry Chris because Chris’s father is responsible for the destruction of their family. He had gone to their father to tell him that Annie was to be married, but seeing his father made him feel remorse for not staying in touch with him while he was in jail. During their conversation, his father explained what had happened at the factory, telling him that it was Joe who told him to cover up the defective parts and ship them out while pretending to have the flu so that he didn’t have to come down to the factory. George insists that Annie knows Joe was responsible.

Then George turns on Chris and cross-examines him about how Joe could possibly have let the defective parts ship out without knowing about it. Listening to Chris resist his implications, George bursts out that Chris is lying to himself. His reason for believing the court decision was that Chris believed it, and he trusted Chris—until he heard the story from his father’s mouth. Now, he feels he knows that Chris is aware of Joe’s culpability, and that’s why Chris won’t have his name put on the business. Again, George insists that Annie leave with him. Before the question can be resolved, however, Kate enters.

George’s appearance worries Kate, who wants to feed him and take care of him. Refusing the offer of a meal, George states that the train will be leaving soon. Asking if Annie will be going with him, Kate begs them both to stay. She insists that there is no argument between George and the Kellers and tells George about Larry’s tree falling. When Lydia enters, she and George, former paramours, have a brief awkward conversation as they update one another on their respective lives. After Lydia’s departure, Kate criticizes Chris and George for not having built happy lives for themselves as Lydia and Frank have done. Once again, George says that he has to leave, and Annie offers to call him a cab. Another tense conversation starts, this time between George and Joe, who presents his plan to employ their father again. George informs Joe that their father hates everyone who made money from the war. Presenting other examples of their father’s bitterness, Joe tells George that certain men will be angry at others in every instance rather than take any blame themselves. 

After Kate comes back and invites him to dinner, George notes that the old place feels the same and everyone is well. Kate agrees, saying that Joe has never been sick. Her husband quickly corrects her, saying that he did have the flu during the war. George is immediately suspicious, beginning to ask questions about what really happened the day Joe claimed to be sick and the defective parts were shipped out in his absence. 

Abruptly, Frank arrives. Announcing that he has finished Larry’s horoscope, he tells Kate that Larry could not possibly have died on his supposed “favorable day.” Kate repeats that “it isn’t possible,” which Chris interprets as her telling Annie to go. Still laser-focused on the question of the flu, George repeats his questions as the taxi pulls up. Kate tells Annie that she has packed Annie’s bag, but Annie will not leave until Chris tells her to go. When George insists that Joe was responsible for the pilots’ deaths, Chris tells him to get out of there. With Annie in pursuit, George leaves.

Angrily, Chris rebukes his mother for packing Annie’s bag. Kate repeats that Annie is Larry’s girl. Both Joe and Chris brutally confront Kate with the reality that Larry is dead. Insistently, Kate explains that she cannot accept that Larry is dead because if he is, that makes Joe responsible.

While Joe bluntly says that Kate is out of her mind, this is Chris’s moment of realization that Joe really was responsible. He turns on Joe, interrogating him about the defective parts. Joe breaks down and reveals that he did let the parts ship knowing they were defective, out of concern for his business reputation, but swears that he thought the parts would be stopped in time. Interrogating him further, Chris violently condemns his father. In a heartbreaking moment, Joe confesses that he did it to preserve the business so that he could pass it down to Chris. This is too much for Chris, who lambasts his father at length before breaking down and walking away.