It was two days after Joan's home-coming. As had been customary since her arrival at Greenacres as a bride, the new Mrs. Gilmore was having a breakfast tray in her room, and she sat at a small table by the window which commanded Joan Sheridan's beloved view of the Tappan Zee. Frilly, lacy things were becoming to the new mistress of Greenacres, and she was an alluring picture, with the loose, flowing sleeves of her morning gown falling back from shapely arms, as she lifted her coffee cup. Morning is the severest test of a woman's beauty, and, only twenty minutes out of bed, although it was half an hour past nine, Helen Gilmore was undeniably a beautiful woman. Her age might have been twenty-three; it may have been even twenty-seven, for she was of the type that clings long to youth. Just now, however, there was in her blue eyes a look of brooding discontent that does not become a bride of three brief, honeymooning weeks. At the hallway door there sounded the rap of knuckles against wood, and in answer to the petulant, "Yes, come," Bates, the butler, crossed the threshold with his shambling gait. "Mail for you, madam," said Bates, holding a silver tray toward her. The topmost envelope was patently an advertising circular, which completely concealed the one beneath, and Helen with a contemptuous glance waved the tray aside. "You should know better than bothering me with things like that," she said shortly; "take it away." "There is also a letter--a personal letter," Bates answered stiffly, as he moved aside the offending advertisement, and revealed a small, cheap envelope, rather smudgy and addressed with a lead pencil in a ragged, scrawling script, as if the hand that wrote it was not far advanced beyond illiteracy. The postmark was New York City. Rather a strange, disreputable-looking missive, one might have thought, to be received by the mistress of Greenacres. Bates stared sharply, as he saw the startling effect that the sight of the letter had on Mrs. Gilmore. Her coffee cup, poised for a moment in mid-air, clattered down to the saucer, and her fingers, reaching swiftly for the envelope, trembled noticeably. Her face had gone white, and into her eyes there came a look that was unquestionably apprehension, perhaps fear. With an effort she controlled herself. "Probably from my little nephew," she said, evidently thinking to explain the smudgy appearance, the crudity of the handwriting. But Bates, moving toward the door with the perfunctory murmur, was not misled. "Huh, little nephew!" he grunted, as he went down the hall. "That was a man's handwritin'. Poor Mr. Kirklan! I'm afraid he's been fooled--fooled bad." When the butler had gone, Helen Gilmore relaxed self-restraint, and there returned to her face that haunted look of fear. Several times she turned the envelope over in her unsteady hands, delaying the opening of it. "He's traced me here!" she whispered. "He knows."