"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! 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. He went straight up to Valenka's room when he found it out, which was at two in the morning, and said he wanted his emeralds; and she flew at him with a dagger. After which he knew nothing at all till a servant came in at eight and found him lying unconscious in her empty room that she'd just walked out of with his emeralds in her pocket. 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. Any girl would have been justified when a man forced his way into her bedroom—for I bet Van Ruyne didn't let out the whole story of that, if he did let out that he bullied her when he found her alone! 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!"
"All that doesn't explain how Valenka got away—or what became of her," said Macartney obstinately. "That's the mystery I began on."
I was bored stiff with the whole thing. And whether she had Van Ruyne's emeralds or not I saw no particular mystery in the Valenka girl's disappearance: she had probably had some one outside who had taken her clear away in a motor car. 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!"
There was something so like honest passion in the break in his voice that involuntarily I glanced at Paulette, to see if by any chance she was startled at Dudley's evidently intimate knowledge of a girl none of us had even heard him speak of—and it took every bit of Indian quiet I owned not to stare at her so hard that Dudley and Macartney must have noticed. She was listening, as motionless as if she were a statue. Her lifted hand still held her pen poised over her unfinished letter; but it was rigid, as the rest of her was rigid. Whether it was from anger, surprise, or jealousy of Dudley, I had no idea, but she sat as if she had been struck dumb. And suddenly I was not sure if she were perfectly collected,—or absolutely abstracted. For—without even a glance to show she felt my eyes on her—the carved lines of her poised hand fell to the level of her wrist that lay flat on the table, and she began to write the signature to her unfinished letter. I could see every separate character as she shaped it; and with the blazing enlightenment of what she set down on paper only a merciful heaven kept my wits in my skull and my tongue quiet in my head.
For the signature she wrote as plainly as I write it now was not Paulette Brown. 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!