“What are they saying, Sherry?”
Sheridan hesitated.
“Come, come; out with it!”
“The Morning Post reported last week that the pasha of the Morea had made you a present of a Circassian girl—”
“It was a Circassian mare!”
“And that you had quarters in a Franciscan nunnery.”
“A monastery!” Gordon laughed—an unmirthful laugh. “With one Capuchin friar, a bandy-legged Turkish cook, a couple of Albanian savages and a dragoman! What tales are they telling at the clubs?”
“That’s about all that’s new—except Petersham. He has some tale of a Turkish peri of yours that you saved from a sack in the Ægean.”
Gordon’s lips set tight together. The pleasure he had felt at his return had been shot through with a new pain that spoke plainly in his question:
“Sherry! Is there no story they tell of these two years that I need not blush at?”