'I've looked out copies of my Bulgarian poems for you,' and she leaned over the edge of the sofa towards a small table. The movement disarranged her skirt, and Dick's eyes were regaled by the show of a thick shapeless leg, 'doubtless swarthy,' he said to himself.
'The title of the first volume,' she said, handing him the books, 'is, Songs of a Stranger. My friend the Bulgarian' (and she mentioned an unpronounceable name) 'contributed a preface. The second volume is entitled, New Songs by the Stranger. You will find a translation appended to each.'
Dick promised that he would read the poems as soon as he got home, and begged Mrs. Forest to proceed with her interesting story of the war in which she had lost her great friend, her spiritual adventure, as she called him.
From Bulgaria she had set forth on a long journey, visiting many parts of China, returning home full of love for Eastern civilization, and regret that Western influence would soon make an end of it. 'But,' she said, 'when I think of my own life, my narrative seems but a faint echo of it all; only a fragment of it appears, whereas, if I could tell the whole of it——'
But Dick inclined to the belief that her genius was dramatic rather than narrative, and to bring the autobiography to an end, he asked her how she had come to be the Mother Superior of the Yarmouth Convent. 'If I can only get her to cut the cackle and get to the 'osses,' he said to himself, but this was not easy to do. Mrs. Forest had to relate her socialistic adventures, her engagement to Edgar Horsley.
'For three years,' she said, 'I was engaged to him, and at the end of this time it seemed to me that we must come to an understanding. He was talking of going to Jamaica, and to go to Jamaica with him we would have to be married. So I went down to where he was staying in the country, a cottage in Somersetshire, at the end of a very pretty lane.'
'Good God! if she's going to describe the landscape to me,' said Dick to himself. But Mrs. Forest had no eye for the appearance of trees showing against the sky, and she was quickly at the cottage door, which was opened to her, she said, by a suspicious-looking woman, who said, 'I think I've heard of you. Mr. Horsley is out, but you can come in and wait,' 'and in about half an hour he came in and introduced me to the woman who had opened the door to me. "Isabel" is all that I can remember of her name. "Isabel," he said, "has been living with me for the last ten years, but if you like to come with us to Jamaica you can join us." This seemed to me to be an inacceptable proposition. "What you propose to me," I said, "is unthinkable," and I left the house, and have not seen or heard of Mr. Edgar Horsley since. I've looked at water, I've looked at poison, and I've looked at daggers.'
Dick asked her why she had meditated suicide and she answered:
'Was not such an end to a three years' engagement sufficient to inspire in any woman a thought of suicide? And I'm very exceptional.'
A great deal of Mrs. Forest's life had been unfolded; the only thing that remained in obscurity was how she had come to be the Mother Superior of the Yarmouth Convent, and to make that plain, she said it would be necessary to tell the story of her conversion to the Catholic faith. 'But that was after the convent; the convent was intended for the reformation of dipsomaniacs, female drunkards,' she said; 'but it was afterwards that I became a Roman Catholic.'