"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?"