only one of his
companions who was willing to follow him anywhere on the face of the
earth. The others received their pay and their discharge with smiling
faces, and scattered to their several homes--Antonio departing to
complete his interrupted honeymoon.

Just before leaving, Harold sought and obtained permission to visit
Maraquita, to bid her good-bye. The poor child was terribly overwhelmed
by the death of her father, and could not speak of him without giving
way to passionate grief. She told Harold that she meant to leave the
coast by the first opportunity that should offer, and proceed to the
Cape of Good Hope, where, in some part of the interior, lived an old
aunt, the only relative she now had on earth, who, she knew, would be
glad to receive her. Our hero did his best to comfort the poor girl,
and expressed deep sympathy with her, but felt that his power to console
was very small indeed. After a brief interview he bade her farewell.

The voyage which our travellers now commenced was likely to be of
considerable duration, for the Seychelles Islands lie a long way to the
eastward of Africa, but as we have said, time was of no importance to
Harold, and he was not sorry to have an opportunity of visiting a group
of islands which are of some celebrity in connexion with the East
African slave-trade. Thus, all unknown to himself or Disco, as well as
to Maraquita, who would have been intensely interested had she known the
fact, he was led towards the new abode of our sable heroine Azinte.

But alas! for Kambira and Obo,--they were being conveyed, also, of
course, unknown to themselves or to any one else, further and further
away from one whom they would have given their heart's blood to meet
with and embrace, and it seemed as if there were not a chance of any
gleam of light bridging over the ever widening gulf that lay between
them, for although Lieutenant Lindsay knew that Azinte had been left at
the Seychelles, he had not the remotest idea that Kambira was Azinte's
husband, and among several hundreds of freed slaves the second
lieutenant of the `Firefly' was not likely to single out, and hold
converse with a chief whose language he did not understand, and who, as
far as appearances went, was almost as miserable, sickly, and degraded
as were the rest of the unhappy beings by whom he was surrounded.

Providence, however, turned the tide of affairs in favour of Kambira and
his son. On reaching Zanzibar Captai