“Because, Letta, you are engaged to me,” replied Robin, with an offended look.
“O, yes; I forgot that. Well?”
Well, what we have arranged is this. I have met with many kind people here, some of whom have been greatly interested in your story, and one of them—a very nice lady, who is going home—has offered to take you with her, and deliver you safely to my mother in England, there to wait till I come home and marry you.
“How nice!” exclaimed Letta; “and you’ll be sure to come home soon?”
“Yes, quite sure, and very soon.”
This arrangement, being deemed satisfactory, was afterwards carried into effect, and Letta sailed a few days later in one of the regular steamers for England via the Suez Canal.
Meanwhile the Great Eastern still lay at her moorings, completing the arrangements for her voyage.
During this period our hero lived in a whirl of excitement. It seemed to himself as if he were the subject of an amazing but by no means unpleasant dream, the only dark spots in which were the departure of Letta and the depravity of John Shanks, alias James Gibson, alias Stumps.
“Oh! Stumps, Stumps,” he soliloquised, sadly, one day while standing on “the green” in the unromantic shade of a huge bale of cotton, “how could you behave so after being our trusted comrade so long!”
“Never mind Stumps just now,” said Sam Shipton, making his appearance at the moment, “but come along with me at once, for we have received an invitation, through my good and remarkable friend Frank Hedley, to the grand entertainment to be given to-night at the palace of the chief and Bahee Sahib of Junkhundee.”