One of his managers, an Italian, had married an English
girl, and they had a daughter with light hair, and blue eyes. It
seems I had been sent to his house one day with a message, and when I
saw his daughter, I cried out, 'Alice, Alice,' and caught the girl in
my arms. Her father was so enraged that he picked up a gun lying near
at hand, and gave me such a terrific blow on the head that I was
knocked senseless. I remember nothing of it, but mistaking Anita for
you was, undoubtedly, my first approach to my former consciousness.
That scene was probably the one which you saw in your dream, Alice,
and to think that afterwards you should be so near me in Palermo, and
neither of us know it!
"At the hospital the doctors found that the blow on my head had
caused but a comparatively unimportant scalp wound, but, in dressing
it, they found that at some earlier time my skull had been crushed.
They performed the delicate operation of trepanning the skull, and
when I came out from the effects of the ether, my mind was in the
same state as it had been twenty-three years before.
"After that my recovery was rapid. Father Paolo made Signor Matrosa
pay me thirty-three hundred lire as my wages for the many years I had
worked for him, and I gave a thousand of it to the manager's
daughter, to whom, in a way, I owed my return to my natural self.
The rest I gave to Father Paolo for the use of his church.
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