st on having your promise that
you won't persuade her to marry you without her mother's and my
consent."

Ventimore gave this undertaking willingly enough, and they returned to
the drawing-room. Mrs. Futvoye could hardly avoid asking Horace, in his
new character of _fiance_, to stay and dine, which it need not be said
he was only too delighted to do.

"There is one thing, my dear--er--Horace," said the Professor, solemnly,
after dinner, when the neat parlourmaid had left them at dessert, "one
thing on which I think it my duty to caution you. If you are to justify
the confidence we have shown in sanctioning your engagement to Sylvia,
you must curb this propensity of yours to needless extravagance."

"Papa!" cried Sylvia. "What _could_ have made you think Horace
extravagant?"

"Really," said Horace, "I shouldn't have called myself particularly so."

"Nobody ever _does_ call himself particularly extravagant," retorted the
Professor; "but I observed at St. Luc that you habitually gave fifty
centimes as a _pourboire_ when twopence, or even a penny, would have
been handsome. And no one with any regard for the value of money would
have given a guinea for a worthless brass vessel on the bare chance that
it might contain manuscripts, which (as any one could have foreseen) it
did not."

"But it's not a bad sort of bottle, sir," pleaded Horace. "If you
remember, you said yourself the shape was unusual. Why shouldn't it be
worth all the money, and more?"

"To a collector, perhaps," said the Professor, with his wonted
amiability, "which you are not. No, I can only call it a senseless and
reprehensible waste of money."

"Well, the truth is," said Horace, "I bought it with some idea that it
might interest _you_."

"Then you were mistaken, sir. It does _not_ interest me. Why should I be
interested in a metal jar which, for anything that appears to the
contrary, may have been cast the other day at Birmingham?"

"But there _is_ something," said Horace; "a seal or inscription of some
sort engraved on the cap. Didn't I mention it?"

"You said nothing about an inscription before," replied the Professor,
with rather more interest. "What is the character--Arabic? Persian?
Kufic?"

"I really couldn't say--it's almost rubbed out--queer little triangular
marks, something like birds' footprints."

"That sounds like Cuneiform," said the Professor, "which would seem to
point to a Phoenician origin. And, as I am acquainted with no O