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on the wind. It had stopped raining, but the boy was unaware of this; he was almost home, and that was a miserable thought. To his surprise and disgust, he found himself wishing he had gone into Dehra with Somi.
    He stood in the side-track and stared down the empty road; and, to his surprise and disgust, he felt immeasurably lonely.

 
Chapter Two
    W HEN A LARGE WHITE butterfly settled on the missionary’s wife’s palatial bosom, she felt flattered, and allowed it to remain there. on ‘exclusively European linesHer garden was beginning to burst into flower, giving her great pleasure—her husband gave her none—and such fellow-feeling as to make her tread gingerly among the caterpillars.
    Mr John Harrison, the boy’s guardian, felt only contempt for the good lady’s buoyancy of spirit, but nevertheless gave her an ingratiating smile.
    ‘I hope you’ll put the boy to work while I’m away,’ he said. ‘Make some use of him. He dreams too much. Most unfortunate that he’s finished with school. I don’t know what to do with him.’
    ‘He doesn’t know what to do with himself,’ said the missionary’s wife. ‘But I’ll keep him occupied. He can do some weeding, or read to me in the afternoon. I’ll keep an eye on him.’
    ‘Good,’ said the guardian. And, having cleared his conscience, he made quick his escape.
    Overlunch he told the boy, ‘I’m going to Delhi tomorrow. Business.’
    It was the only thing he said during the meal. When he had finished eating, he lighted a cigarette and erected a curtain of smoke between himself and the boy. He was a heavy smoker. His fingers were stained a deep yellow.
    ‘How long will you be gone, sir?’ asked Rusty, trying to sound casual.
    Mr Harrison did not reply. He seldom answered the boy’s questions, and his own were stated, not asked; he probed and suggested, sharply, quickly, without ever encouraging loose conversation. He never talked about himself; he never argued: he would tolerate no argument.
    He was a tall man, neat in appearance; and, though over forty, looked younger because he kept his hair short, shaving above the ears. He had a small ginger toothbrush moustache.
    Rusty was afraid of his guardian.
    Mr Harrison, who was really a cousin of the boy’s father, had done a lot for Rusty, and that was why the boy was afraid of him. Since his parents had died, Rusty had been kept, fed and paid for, and sent to an expensive school in the hills that was runon ‘exclusively European lines’. He had, in a way, been bought by Mr Harrison. And now he was owned by him. And he must do as his guardian wished.
    Rusty was ready to do as his guardian wished: he had always obeyed him. But he was afraid of the man, afraid of his silence and of the ginger moustache and of the supple malacca cane that lay in the glass cupboard in the drawing-room.
    Lunch over, the boy left his guardian giving the cook orders, and went to his room.
    The window looked out on the garden path, and a sweeper boy moved up and down the path, a bucket clanging against his naked thighs. He wore only a loincloth, his body was bare and burnt a deep brown, and his head was shaved clean. He went to and from the water-tank, and every time he returned to it he bathed, so that his body continually glistened with moisture.
    Apart from Rusty, the only boy in the European community of Dehra was this sweeper boy, the low-caste untouchable, the cleaner of pots. But the two seldom spoke to each other, one was a servant and the other a sahib and anyway, muttered Rusty to himself, playing with the sweeper boy would be unhygienic . . .
    The missionary’s wife had said, ‘Even if you were an Indian, my child, you would not be allowed to play with the sweeper boy.’ So that Rusty often wondered: with whom, then,
could
the sweeper boy play?
    The untouchable passed by the window and smiled, but Rusty looked away.
    Over the tops of the cherry trees were mountains. Dehra lay in a valley in the foothills, and the