raking up the fire.

Charliet had gone after Macartney, with Dudley and Baker. I guessed
Paulette had got up and was trying to start the fire,--for she was
always working to keep things comfortable--if I haven't mentioned
it--even for me. I once caught her darning my rags of socks and crying
over them--the Lord knew why! I went in to stop her now--and it was I
who stopped dead in the doorway. It was not Paulette inside: it was
Marcia! Marcia in a velvet dressing gown, poking the ashes all over the
hearth. I could have sworn I had seen Paulette burn the letter she had
signed with Tatiana Paulina Valenka's name, but all the same the look of
Marcia's back turned me sick. And her face turned me sicker as she flung
around on me, with her fingers all ashes,--and Paulette's letter in her
hand!

I kept back a curse at the raw fool that was me. I might have seen it
was not a tightly folded wad of stiff paper I had watched burn up, but
just the light torn scraps Paulette had thrown in with it. What was
more, I had been alone with the thing under my very nose in the light
ashes into which it must have sunk and never had the sense to burrow for
it. It was too late even to snatch for it: Marcia had read it! She held
it up to me now,--and Tatiana Paulina Valenka, black on the yellow of
the scorched paper, hit me on the eyes.

"Who was right, Nicky Stretton?" she demanded triumphantly. "I told you
I'd seen _Paulette Brown_ before! Only I never thought of the Houston
business. I could kill Dudley; how dare he bring me out here with a
thief! I won't have her here another day."

"What thief?" I snapped. "I don't know what you mean! Why on earth are
you poking in the ashes? What are you up for?"

"Only a Paulette Brown could stay asleep, with Dudley yelling at you and
Macartney," scornfully. "But if you want to know what I was poking in
the ashes for, I had no matches, and my fire was out, so I came in here
for a log to light it up. And I found this!"

"Well, burn it," said I furiously. But she had begun to read it out, and
I would have been a fool to stop her, for what Marcia knew I had to
know. But it knocked me silly. The something Paulette had "wanted to
make clear" was just a letter to Hutton! And the Lord knows it made me
more set than ever on getting to Skunk's Misery before Hutton could know
that Tatiana Paulina Valenka had given in! Because she had. She was not
only going to meet him; she was going away with him, Marcia's