That night the young man of the caravan had curious dreams, and throughout them all moved, like a presiding fairy, Matt of Abertaw. Sometimes he was wandering on stormy shores, watching the wrecks of mighty argosies; again, he was in mysterious caverns underneath the ground, searching for and finding buried treasure; still again, he was standing on the decks of storm-tossed vessels, while the breakers thundered close at hand, and the bale-fires burned on the lonely headlands. But at all times, and in all places, Matt was his companion. And curiously enough, Matt in his dream was very different to the Matt of waking reality--taller and brighter--in fact, as beautiful as a vision can be; so that his spirit was full of a strange sensation of love and pity, and the touch of the warm little hand filled his imagination with mysterious joy. So vivid did this foolish dream become at last, that he found himself seated on a sunny rock by the sea, by Matt’s side; and he was talking to her like a lover, with his arm around her waist; and she turned to him, with her great eyes fixed on his, and kissed him over and over again, so passionately--that he awoke! It was blowing hard, and the rain was pelting furiously on the roof of the caravan. He tried to go to sleep again, but the face of Matt (as he had seen it in his dream) kept him for a long time awake. “Now, young man,” he said to himself, “this is idiotic. In the first place, Matt is a child, not a young woman; in the second place, she is a vulgar little thing, not a young lady; in the third place, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for thinking of sentiment at all in such a connection. Is your brain softening, youngster? or are you labouring under the malign influence of William Jones? The kiss you gave to this unsophisticated daughter of the desert was paternal, or say, amicable; it was a very nice kiss, but it has no right to make you dream of stuff and nonsense.” But the influence of the dream was over him, and in that half-sleeping, half-waking state, he felt like a boy in love. He found himself calculating the age of his own friend. Let him see! it was fifteen years since, in her own figurative expression, she “come ashore,” and the question remained, how old was she on that interesting occasion? As far as he could make out from her appearance, she could not be more than sixteen. For a damsel of that age, her kiss was decidedly precocious.