All the disjointed admissions which she had made regarding her acquaintance with the dead Minister for Justice, her appeal to him to speak the truth and clear her of some mysterious stigma, and her mention of the Villa Verde out at Tivoli crowded upon me. When we suffer very much everything that smiles in the sun seems cruel. Beneath that beautiful face, pale in the bright moonbeams shining upon it, was mystery--a great unfathomable mystery. Was she not daughter of one of the cleverest thieves in Europe? And, if so, could she not most probably keep a secret if one were entrusted to her? For some ten minutes or so I was silent. The engines throbbed, the dark waters hissed past, and swiftly we were heading for the lights of Dover. At any moment Miller, who had gone below to get a whisky and soda with a friend he had met, a gentlemanly-looking Englishman, might return. I wondered whether it were judicious to tell her one fact. At last I spoke. "You recollect, Miss Miller, that you once mentioned the Villa Verde, at Tivoli, where, I think, Nardini lived the greater part of the year?" "Yes," was her rather mechanical answer. "Why? What causes you to recollect that?" "Because--well, because the other day I learnt something in confidence concerning it." "Concerning the villa!" she gasped, starting and turning to me with a changed expression of fear and apprehension. "What--what were you told? Who told you?" "Well, probably it is a fact of which you are unaware, for only the police know it, and they have hushed it up," I said. "After the flight of Nardini the police who went to search the villa and seize his effects made a very startling discovery." "Discovery! What did they find?" she inquired eagerly, her face now blanched to the lips. "The body of a young woman--the young Englishwoman who was your friend!" I said, with my eyes fixed upon her. She started forward, glaring at me open-mouthed. She tried to speak, but no sound escaped her lips. Her gloved hands were trembling, her dark eyes staring out of her head. "Then the police have searched!" she gasped at last. "They know the truth! I--I am--" And she fell back again into the long deck-chair, rigid and insensible. CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE. AN EVENING AT HYDE PARK GATE. When Miller returned and found his daughter conscious but prostrate, he naturally attributed it to _mal-de-mer_, and began to poke fun at her for being ill upon such a calm sea. She looked at me in meaning silence. Then, when he had left us to walk towards the stern, she said in a low, apologetic voice:-- "Forgive me, Mr Leaf. I--I'm so very foolish. But what you have told me is so amazing. Tell me further--what have the police found at the villa?" I wondered whether she had seen in any of the Italian papers an account of the second discovery--the man who had been so brutally done to death. "Well, from what I gather the police found a dead woman locked in Nardini's study."