"You can say Macartney's real name," I snapped bitterly. "I've known he was Dick Hutton ever since last night."
But Paulette only gasped, as if she did not care whether I knew it or not, "Where—how—did you get these cards?"
I told her, and she gave a queer low moan. "Dudley's dead, and I'm past crying." Her voice never rose when she was moved; it went down, to D below the line on a violin. "I'm past everything, but wishing I was dead, too, for I'm the reason that brought Dick Hutton here as Macartney. Oh, you should have let me meet him that night! I wasn't only going to meet him; I meant to go away with him before morning. It would have been too late for poor, innocent old Thompson, but it would have saved the four mill men—and Dudley!" She had said she was past crying, but her voice thrilled through me worse than tears; and it might have thrilled Marcia in her room across the passage, if I'd remembered Marcia. "God knows Dudley was good to me—but it's no use talking of that now. What have you done with Macart—with Dick Hutton—that you said you had him safe for now?"
"Knocked him out; and tied him up with the clothesline, in the living room—till I can take him out to Caraquet to be hanged!"
"You ought to have killed him," Paulette answered very slowly. "I would have, when we found Dudley, only he'd taken my gun. At least, I believe he had: he said I'd lost it. And I'm afraid, without it—while Dick Hutton's alive!"
I looked at her ghastly face and behaved like a fool for the hundredth time in this history; for I shoved my own gun into her hand and told her to keep it, that I'd get another. I would have caught her in my arms if it had not been for remembering Dudley, who was dead because the two of us had held our tongues to him. "Look here," I said irrelevantly. "D'ye know Marcia thinks Macartney wants to marry her?"
"He doesn't want to marry any one—except me," Paulette retorted scornfully; and once more I should have remembered Marcia across the passage, only I didn't. "He's made love to Marcia, of course, for a blind, like he did everything else. If we could make her realize that and that he killed Dudley as surely as if he'd lifted his own hand to him——"
But I cut her off. "By gad, Paulette, what sticks me is what Macartney did all this for!"
"Me," said Paulette very bitterly. "At least, at first; I'm not so sure about it now. When I first met Dick we were in Russia. He'd got into trouble over a copper mine—you've heard Macartney talk of the Urals?"—if we both spoke of him as though he were two different men neither of us noticed. "He came to me in Petrograd, penniless, and I helped him. But when I came to America, alone, I turned him out of my flat. He may have loved me, I don't know; but when I wouldn't marry him, he said he'd make me; that he'd hound me wherever I went and disgrace me, till I had to give in and come to him. And he must have done it at the Houstons', if I don't know how; for the police would take me now for those emeralds I never stole, if they knew where I was. I can't see where Dick could have been or how he managed the thing, but all the rest Dudley told you and him about that night at the Houstons' was true. I did give Van Ruyne sleeping stuff to keep him quiet while I got away, but it was because it came over me—the second I knew those emeralds were gone—that Dick must be in that house!—that if I didn't run away, he'd come in and threaten me till I had to go with him. And I'd have died first. I slipped out of the house unseen; and it was just the Blessed Virgin," simply, "who made me find Dudley's car stalled outside the Houstons' gate!"
"D'ye mean you'd known Dudley before?"