His inspection was interrupted by the girl herself. Starting as if from a delightful trance, she sprang to her feet and cried-- “I can’t stop no longer. I’m going.” “But the picture, Matt?” said Brinkley, rising also. “Shan’t I finish it to-day!” “I can’t wait. William Jones wants to send me a message over to Pencroes, and if I don’t go, he’ll scold.” “Very well, Matt.” “But I’ll come,” she said, smiling, “tomorrow; and I’ll come in my Sunday clothes, somehow.” “Don’t trouble. On reflection, I think you look nicer as you are.” She lifted her hat from the ground, and still hesitated as she put it on. “Upon my word,” cried the artist, “those Welsh hats are very becoming. Good-bye, Matt.” She took his outstretched hand and waited an instant, with her warm, brown cheek in profile temptingly near his lips. But he did not yield to the temptation, and after a moment’s further hesitation, in which I fear she betrayed some little disappointment, Matt released her hand and sprang hurriedly away. “Upon my word,” muttered the young man, as he watched her figure receding in the distance, “the situation is growing more and more troublesome! I shall have to make a clean bolt of it, if this goes on. Fancy being caught in a flirtation with a wild ocean waif, a child of the wilderness, who never even heard of Lindley Murray? Really, it will never do!” CHAPTER VIII.--THE DEVIL’S CAULDRON. It so happened that the young man of the caravan had two considerable faults. The first fault my reader has, no doubt, already guessed--he was constitutionally lazy. The second fault will appear more clearly in the sequel: he was, also, constitutionally inquisitive. Now, his laziness was of that not uncommon kind which is capable of a great deal of activity, so long as that activity is unconscious, and not realized as being in the nature of _work_; and its possessor, therefore, would frequently, in his idle way, bestir himself a good deal; whereas, if he had been ordered to bestir himself, he would have yawned and resisted. Here his other constitutional defect came in, and set him prying into matters which in no way seriously concerned him. A little time before the period of his present excursion, when he was studying law in Dublin, and rapidly discovered that he loved artistic amateurship much better, he had often been known to work terribly hard at “cases” in which his curiosity was aroused; and I may add in passing that he had shown on these occasions an amount of shrewdness which would have made him an excellent lawyer, if his invincible objection to hard work, _qua_ work, had not invariably interfered.