house while he was still a
baby, and then Terence would scream and kick so, when the good priest
came near him, that he never dared touch him. The first time that he
came, Ellen told him about Mrs. O'Brien's christening the child, and
asked him if it was right for her to do it.

"Was the child looking sick, and as if he was likely to die?" Father
Duffy asked.

"He was, father," Ellen answered; "I couldn't deny that."

"Then it was right for her to christen him," the priest answered,
"and he'll not need to be christened again. In fact, he can't be
christened again."

But long after that, when they tried to take him to church, he would
never go. If Peter and Ellen started for church with him he would run
away from them. They could not even hold him. He would get away from
them, and sometimes they could not tell how he did it, only he would
be gone. And then the only way that they could find him was to go home
again, and there he was sure to be, as safe as ever, only he had not
been at church. And so, after a while, they stopped trying to make him
go.

When the two children were old enough to play together, Terence never
seemed to be happy except when he was with Kathleen. He did not care
in the least to play with other boys. He did not seem to care in the
least to play at all. All he wanted was to be with Kathleen. Kathleen
never liked him, and she did not like to have him with her so much of
the time. But she was too kind-hearted to hurt anybody in any way,
even a boy whom she did not like, so she tried to treat him as nicely
as she could, and she told nobody but her grandmother, to whom she
told everything, that she was not as pleased to be with him as he was
to be with her.

Terence, in his turn, did not always treat Kathleen well, any more
than he did anybody else. He was ill-natured with her and he played
tricks on her that were not pleasant at all, and yet he wanted to be
always with her. Perhaps it was partly because she was more kind to
him than anybody else, except Ellen. For nobody else liked him. And if
he was bad-tempered and unkind to other people, it made other people
unkind and bad-tempered to him, but nothing could make Kathleen unkind
to anybody.

"It's not fair you all are to Terence," Ellen said once to Mrs.
O'Brien, "to think bad of him the way you do. There's things about him
that don't seem right, I know, but those things don't show the way he
really is. I dunno if I'm making you understan