They were evidently in search of something else. Surely they had not deliberately sacrificed a man's life to obtain those few dusty papers? What, I wondered, was contained in that precious packet which the owner of that villa had given me before his death? Two large matrices of official seals Miller drew out and examined. "Ah! yes!" exclaimed Gavazzi, "I suspected he had those. They are copies of the seal of the Ministry, and with them he fabricated quite a number of official documents. By means of those he sent an order to the convict prison at Volteria to release Rastelli, the forger, who was a friend of his. The Governor at once set him at liberty, and does not know to this day that the order was a forgery. Indeed, I believe that, for a consideration, he used to give out these orders." "And he made them himself!" Miller laughed. "A pretty profitable business!" And he turned over the brass seals in his hand, while the little clock ticked on. "Of course. If he had only been satisfied and not attempted too much, he would have remained years in office without any suspicion falling upon him. I, however, knew something of what was in progress, and yet he defied me and absolutely refused to let me share. Well--you know the rest," he laughed. "I didn't see why he should take all the profits and I do the work." "But you managed to be pretty well paid," his friend remarked. "I merely looked after myself. Yet, if Giovanni had not been a fool and taken me into the affair when he knew that I'd discovered everything, we might have run the Ministry as a joint concern until--well, until the next Cabinet crisis or King Umberto dismissed us. It's a pity--a thousand pities--he was such a fool. But you see he got unnerved, he was afraid of his enemies, and so he acknowledged his peculations by bolting." "A fatal mistake," Miller declared. "I wonder he didn't get across to Greece. The police couldn't have touched him there. He knew the law of extradition quite as well as you or I. To go to South America is simply running into the arms of the police." "I question whether he is in America," the doctor said, examining deliberately the contents of another of the pigeon-holes. "The report may have been circulated by the police themselves--as reports so often are--to put the fugitive off his guard. No, I should think that he is more likely in Paris, or Vienna, or Berlin. He could reach either capital by the through train from Rome. He probably put on a suit of workman's clothes and travelled third-class with a stick and a bundle. That's the safest way to get out of the country--don't you think so? We've both done it more than once," he laughed. There was something distinctly humorous to me in the owner of the Manor at Studland travelling as an Italian labourer among the unwashed third-class passengers and passing the guards at the frontier with his worldly belongings tied up in a dirty handkerchief.