“When you find this I shall be far away. I have taken five thousand dollars in cash and the diamonds which were in my safe-deposit drawer, which amount to twenty thousand more. The balance of the money and the real estate I have turned over to Wilbur; I hate him, but he has a right to the property. “You do not understand, and will wonder; I will explain. “You remember the time when, to all appearances, Arthur Lombard dropped dead; amid great, apparent grief, and much excitement he was carried to this house where he lay silent and motionless for three days. “At the same instant in which he fell in his elegantly appointed office, almost in the same manner, fell Antoni Petronelli, one of a band of roving gypsies, who dwelt in a fair southern country, with no covering save the waving arms of the forest trees, or at most a house of boughs for shelter at night or in storm. As Edith and Gus mourned over Arthur Lombard, so Andalusia Varana mourned over Antoni—yet not the same—the cool blood of your race cannot realize the fierce love and desperate grief of the untrammeled children of the South. “At the very instant that Arthur Lombard awoke to life again, that same instant arose as one from the dead, Antoni Petronelli. “Now comes the really strange, and tragic part of the story. When these two souls were loosed from the body and entered space, they drifted without knowledge of their destination; but that an intelligent power directed them is proved by this; although so far apart, the soul of Arthur Lombard sought the body of the gypsy Petronelli; and the spirit of Petronelli was forced to enter the effeminate body of Arthur Lombard. “I can speak only of my own impression; I, the soul of the gypsy, Petronelli, and the body of the aesthetic banker, Arthur Lombard. When I regained consciousness I had but a confused mingling of ideas; some things—impressions, knowledge, thoughts—which had been the property of Lombard, haunted me; it was as though these things had been photographed on the brain, to be brought forth and used by the occupant of the body as occasion required. I did not understand the use of this knowledge; I detested the fair-skinned body; I hated the limitations of his life—which you call refinements; the greatest trial of all was that for a long time I did not know what I was fighting against. I knew only that I was miserably unhappy.