Nobody was actively unkind. He had plenty to eat, a nice room which he shared with Cedric, who was destined for a school all fads and flannel-shirts, and already could make his own bed and empty his washing-basin—matters wherein Ronnie was hopelessly ignorant, and showed no aptitude when Cedric tried to teach him. That was the mischief: Cedric and Githa were always teaching, and let him know it; and it roused every evil disposition in Ronnie; so that he was rapidly becoming a sort of Ishmael both in feeling and in fact. Then Miss Biddle brought them to the seaside, while aunt and uncle went for a walking tour in Wales. The soft wind blew a cloud over the sun. Ronnie shivered and arose from his stone. Cedric and Githa were still absorbed in their plan. Miss Biddle was breathlessly following the fortunes of "The Hon. Jane." Ronnie, wilfully disobedient, decided to go for a walk by himself along the edge of the cornfield. No ideas had come to him except the omnipresent determination to go back to Uncle Gerald till mother should come Home. But how? He was sensible and sophisticated enough to know he couldn’t walk there, and that he hadn’t enough money to go by train. He had, to be precise, exactly one penny in the world; the weekly penny given to each of them every Monday by Miss Biddle on behalf of Uncle Edward. He couldn’t write, and he knew that it would both distress and annoy his aunt if she heard that he was unhappy in her house. She would never _see_ he was unhappy; he was sure of that. She would only see that he was "unpleasant." He stumped along, picking his way through the stones and thistles, big with an entirely vague purpose, when suddenly he came upon a man sitting, as he himself had been sitting a few minutes ago, on a big stone; only this man had a blotting-pad upon his knees and was writing very fast. He wore a panama hat tilted almost over his nose to shelter his eyes, big round spectacles with tortoise-shell rims, and as he finished a sheet he laid it on a pile of others that, like Cedric’s plan, were kept from blowing away by the stones laid upon them. Ronnie watched him breathlessly. How fast he wrote! Uncle Gerald could write like that, and daddie ... and thinking of daddie there came into his mind the picture of a busy Eastern street, and the likhnè-wālā (letter-writer) sitting on the curbstone in the sunshine ready to write letters for those who could not write themselves ... if they could pay him. "Was this man a likhnè-wālā? He looked like a sahib, but then so did Robinson, and he was Uncle Gerald’s _gharri-wallah_. Ronnie drew a little nearer. If this man was a likhnè-wālā, would he—oh, would he—write a letter for _one_ anna? Ronnie felt it was a very small sum to offer, but the man looked kind, and he could write so fast. It wouldn’t take him long. Perhaps if he was approached very politely.... Ronnie crept a bit nearer and the man looked up and saw him.