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Updated: June 25, 2025
I knew I had to wake Paulette up to what she had done and shut up Dudley before he let out any more intimate details the public had never known, like Van Ruyne's bandaged wrist. I yawned and got up, with one hand on the table, and my forefinger pointing straight to that black signature of Tatiana Paulina Valenka that ought to have been Paulette Brown.
I knew a poor devil of a cousin of hers out in British Columbia who was engaged to her when it happened, and he talked about her enough. Oh, yes, Valenka! She had a funny Christian name too, sort of half Russian, only I forget it. But when that Valenka girl got away with an emerald necklace from the Houstons' house no one ever found out how it was done! You must have heard about her, Stretton?"
I had nothing pleasant to think of, either. It was no use my trying to imagine that Tatiana Paulina Valenka was not going to marry Dudley, whatever I had hoped about Paulette Brown. As far as any chance of her loving me was concerned, I had lost my dream girl forever.
It was Tatiana Paulina that "queer Christian name, half Russian too," of the dancing circus-rider, that no one had ever mentioned, Tatiana Paulina Valenka! "Must I go now in the moonlight clear? Would God that it were dark, That I might pass like a homeless hound Men neither miss nor mark." The Ransom. I sat as still as if I had been stabbed.
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.
"I suppose it never struck you that I believed the man playing the game was Collins till you both disappeared, and I decided it must be some one who never was employed around this mine!" "Well, I'm hanged," said Collins, and suddenly knocked the wits out of me by muttering that at least we'd both had sense enough to know that Miss Valenka was square. "Valenka? D'ye mean you knew who she was, too?"
I stowed away Thompson's deuce of hearts, that no boy had ever come for, in the case with those other pitiful cards he had told me to search, and got on my feet with only one thought in my head, to get back to La Chance and my dream girl that Macartney was alone with, except for Dudley, Dudley whom he hated, who had threatened him for Paulette Valenka, for Thompson, till it was no wonder I had found him with the face of a devil where he lurked eavesdropping in the shack hall.
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.
I know you hate me now, but have some mercy; don't do what I'm afraid of. I'll give you all you want myself everything if only you'll let that be. Go away, as I begged you, and I'll leave Dudley for you, and go too." And it was signed, as I knew Paulette Brown had not meant to sign anything, "Tatiana Paulina Valenka."
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.
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