Green Shutters

The play opens with a Prologue in the grounds of a mental home from which an inmate has just escaped. The action then shifts to Green Shutters, the home of Jane Mallory, a courageous, self-reliant widow with a grown-up son and two daughters. The children believe their father to have died many years before in Australia. Ellery Baske, an unpleasant young man, visits the house. He is the son of Leonard Baske, an artist, who disappeared about the time of Mallory's death, and whose portrait he had painted. Baske discovers that Jane and his father had been in love, and suspects that the latter was murderede by Mallory and buried secretly in the churchyard. He threatens exposure, and all that Jane has built up for her children seems likely to be destroyed. The escaped patient from the asylum arrives at Green Shutters at the critical moment. Baske is appalled to find that the fugative is not Mallory, as he imagined, but his own father, who, it is revealed, had murdered Mallory. Baske departs, and Jane, left with a docile though imbecile Leonard, knows at last her children's future is safe.