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Updated: June 25, 2025
I said so, more because Dudley was glaring at Macartney like a maniac than anything else. And Dudley caught me up short. "I won't have either of you say one more word about Valenka in my house. She was as good as she was pretty; and if some one helped her away she deserved 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 missed fire about getting you that night, thanks to that fool Wilbraham happening round with his car. But now I'll take all I did this whole business for and that's you, Paulette Valenka!" Paulette never took her eyes from him. "That's a lie," she said quite evenly. "Oh, not that you took the emeralds; I believe that. But it was not only to get me into trouble. It was for themselves!
Talk about something else, for goodness sake!" "Not I I'm going to bed," Macartney returned casually. Dudley always did work himself up over things that were none of his business, and the Valenka argument evidently had not struck his superintendent as anything out of the ordinary. He nodded and went out.
I don't know how he managed the thing, but I know he was there in the Houstons' house, somehow, if Paulette doesn't think so" he forgot all about the Valenka "and that he took those emeralds; left the girl powerless even to think so; and disappeared. I never saw him; don't even know what he looks like.
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 hard voice read out baldly, if only he would give up the plan in his head. But it was the last sentence that bit into me: "Oh, Dick, have some mercy!
Houston didn't know it, or she never would have asked the nasty little cad to a spring week-end party." "To lose an emerald necklace and be stabbed and drugged," commented Macartney drily. "Oh, I'm not saying the Valenka girl wasn't a marvellous sight on a horse!
It was no wonder she had laughed when I asked her if she could ride, no wonder I had thought she moved like Pavlova. Paulette Brown, whom Dudley had brought to La Chance, was Tatiana Paulina Valenka, who had or had not stolen Van Ruyne's emeralds! But the blood sprang into my face at the knowledge, for by all the holy souls and my dead mother's name she was my dream girl too!
"I guess Miss Valenka knows the reason all right," Collins spoke as coolly as if she were not there, which may have been the wisest thing to do, for though she flushed sharply she said nothing. He went on with exactly what she had said herself.
There would be all sorts of fuss and unpleasantness to go through with the sheriff from Caraquet, over what was left of Macartney; there was old Thompson's death to be accounted for; Van Ruyne's emeralds to be returned to him, so that Tatiana Paulina Valenka, and not Paulette Brown, could marry that lucky, Indian-dark fool who was Nicky Stretton.
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