ned. The best thing I can do is to go to bed at once."

Which he accordingly proceeded to do.

CHAPTER V

CARTE BLANCHE

When Ventimore woke next morning his headache had gone, and with it the
recollection of everything but the wondrous and delightful fact that
Sylvia loved him and had promised to be his some day. Her mother, too,
was on his side; why should he despair of anything after that? There was
the Professor, to be sure--but even he might be brought to consent to an
engagement, especially if it turned out that the brass bottle ... and
here Horace began to recall an extraordinary dream in connection with
that extremely speculative purchase of his. He had dreamed that he had
forced the bottle open, and that it proved to contain, not manuscripts,
but an elderly Jinnee who alleged that he had been imprisoned there by
the order of King Solomon!

What, he wondered, could have put so grotesque a fancy into his head?
and then he smiled as he traced it to Sylvia's playful suggestion that
the bottle might contain a "genie," as did the famous jar in the
"Arabian Nights," and to her father's pedantic correction of the word to
"Jinnee." Upon that slight foundation his sleeping brain had built up
all that elaborate fabric--a scene so vivid and a story so
circumstantial and plausible that, in spite of its extravagance, he
could hardly even now persuade himself that it was entirely imaginary.
The psychology of dreams is a subject which has a fascinating mystery,
even for the least serious student.

As he entered the sitting-room, where his breakfast awaited him, he
looked round, half expecting to find the bottle lying with its lid off
in the corner, as he had last seen it in his dream.

Of course, it was not there, and he felt an odd relief. The
auction-room people had not delivered it yet, and so much the better,
for he had still to ascertain if it had anything inside it; and who knew
that it might not contain something more to his advantage than a
maundering old Jinnee with a grievance several thousands of years old?

Breakfast over, he rang for his landlady, who presently appeared. Mrs.
Rapkin was a superior type of her much-abused class. She was
scrupulously clean and neat in her person; her sandy hair was so smooth
and tightly knotted that it gave her head the colour and shape of a
Barcelona nut; she had sharp, beady eyes, nostrils that seemed to smell
battle afar off, a wide, thin mouth that apparently cl