The Mysterious Mr. Miller by William Le Queux

The mysterious flight of Nardini, the prominent politician and Minister for Justice, was, it seemed, still the one topic of conversation in the "Eternal City", Only that morning I had read a paragraph in the _Tribuna_ that the fugitive was believed to have reached Buenos Ayres. The Embassy in London had evidently kept the secret I had divulged, and even the Italian police were in ignorance that the man wanted for that gigantic embezzlement -- for the sum stated to have disappeared was now known to be a very large one -- was already in his grave.

The mysterious discovery at the dead man's villa out at Tivoli, that pleasant little town with the wonderful cascade twenty miles outside Rome, greatly complicated the problem. And the girl who had been found in such strange circumstances was actually an intimate friend of Lucie Miller! The whole thing was assuming a shape entirely beyond my comprehension.