“I made this sketch the last night I saw him in Greece,” he said, “at Missolonghi, just a year ago.”
Lady Caroline Lamb and Miss Milbanke both bent to look at the portrait. When they withdrew their eyes, the calmer, colder features showed nothing, but Lady Caroline’s wore a deep, vivid flush.
“Mad, bad and dangerous to know!” her brain was saying, “yet—what a face!”
CHAPTER III
THE BOOMERANG
“George Gordon!”
There was an unaffected pleasure in the exclamation, and its echo in the answer: “Sherry! And young as ever, I’ll be bound!”
“I heard last night at Lady Jersey’s you were in London,” said Sheridan, after the first greetings. “So you’ve had enough of Greece, eh? Three years! What have you done in all that time?”
“I have dined the mufti of Thebes, I have viewed the harem of Ali Pasha, I have kicked an Athenian postmaster. I was blown ashore on the island of Salamis. I caught a fever going to Olympia. And I have found that I like to be back in England—the oddest thing of all!”
Gordon ended half-earnestly. Threading the familiar thoroughfares, tasting the city’s rush, its interminableness, its counterplay and torsion of living, he had felt a sense of new appreciation. His months of freer breathing in the open spaces of the East had quickened his pulses.
The pair strolled on together chatting, the old wit linking his arm in the younger man’s. He had always liked Gordon and the appearance of his famous tour de force had lifted this liking into genuine admiration.