Jewel Mysteries, from a Dealer's Note Book
from it, when all was settled, a few thousand pounds, by the generosity of the father's partners. Beyond these he had the opal, which the family had possessed for three hundred years, buying it originally in Vienna. This possession, however, had been, for the sake of some absurd tradition, always kept a profound secret, and when the great crash came, the man whose death I had witnessed took it as his fortune. For some years he had lived freely at Rome, at Nice, at Naples, where he married; but his money being almost spent, he brought his wife to England, and there attempted to sell the jewel. As he would tell nothing of his history, lest his father's name should suffer, he found no buyer, and dragged on from month to month, going deeper in the byways of poverty until he came to me. The rest I have told you.

Of the opal which I saw so wofully crushed in the lodging-house in Boscobel Place, but one large[ 29] fragment remained. I have had that set in a ring, and have sold it to-day for fifty pounds. The money will go to Madame Carmalovitch, who has returned to her parents in Naples. She has suffered much.

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THE NECKLACE OF GREEN DIAMONDS.

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THE NECKLACE OF GREEN DIAMONDS.

I can remember perfectly well the day upon which I received the order from my eccentric old friend, Francis Brewer, to make him a necklace of green diamonds. It was the 2d of May in the year 1890, exactly three days after his marriage with the fascinating little singer, Eugenie Clarville, who had set Paris aflame with the piquancy of her acting and her delightful command of a fifth-rate voice some six months after Brewer had left London to take up the management of a great banking enterprise in the French capital. He was then well into the forties; but he had 
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