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Updated: May 26, 2025
But what Van Ruyne told the police was that he gave his string of emeralds to her on the Saturday afternoon, and got a note from her just after dinner saying that she returned them; only the case in the time-honored method this time was empty when he opened it! He was blazing.
First because she was beggared; and second because she'd been taught dancing in the Imperial School at Petrograd and riding in the Grand Duchess Tatiana's private ring for haute manége; and was a corker at both. She called herself plain Valenka, and Jimmy Van Ruyne went crazy about her though Mrs.
She's free and red-handed somewhere, if no one ever found out who railroaded her and Van Ruyne's emeralds out of the United States!" What sent Dudley into a blazing rage was beyond me. But he fairly yelled at Macartney. "Free she may be, but when you say 'red-handed' you say a lie! If Jimmy Van Ruyne was fool enough to think so, it was because no Van Ruyne ever could see a. b. spelled ab.
Houston took a fancy to Valenka and had her down to ride and dance at a week-end party at her house in Long Island; that on Sunday morning, Jimmy Van Ruyne, one of the guests, was found in Valenka's room, soaked with morphine and robbed not only of the cash in his pocket in the good old way, but of an emerald necklace he had just bought at Tiffany's; and that, to this day, no one has ever laid eyes on that necklace nor on Valenka.
And no one's ever laid eyes on her, or on Van Ruyne's emeralds ever since." "That's what Van Ruyne says," Dudley began hotly and went on in a different voice. "The Valenka girl never stole his emeralds! She may have cut him across the wrist with one of those knife-things women will use for paper cutters; I don't say she didn't.
"I was talking about that liar, Van Ruyne," he said, glaring at Macartney. "He may be a liar, all right," said Macartney rather unpleasantly. "Only, if that Valenka girl didn't steal his emeralds, Mr. Wilbraham, who did?" "That cousin of hers you said you knew; Hutton, or whatever you said his name was," Dudley retorted, like a fool, for Macartney had never mentioned the man's name.
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.
Dick Hutton was a friend of mine; no matter how much he was in love with a girl who'd got sick of him for Van Ruyne, he wasn't the kind to sneak round the Houstons' house as a servant. I won't let any one say that with impunity. It's no use my telling Wilbraham so in the state he's in to-night, but you might gently hint it when you've a chance.
The wonder was that she had ever forgotten how she had seen her dancing at the Hippodrome on her four horses as no girl ever had danced or forgotten the story about her that she had said was "queer"! If Marcia's eyes had fallen on the signature mine were on now, I knew her first act would have been to write to Jimmy Van Ruyne; that even if she had only heard Dudley defending an ostensibly absent Valenka she would have written for Marcia was no fool.
And he didn't lay any stress, either, on the fact that he was found with the cut artery in his wrist that was all the stabbing that ailed him bound up as a surgeon would have done it; or that he'd been given just enough morphine to keep him from wriggling off his bandage and bleeding to death before anybody came: not Van Ruyne!"
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