“Well, Tomás?” The priest lifted him up and pulled up his trousers. “Why did you steal it?”

“I had no pencil.”

“That’s no reason why you should take his.” Father Conroy looked down sternly at the small figure. “It’s a sin to steal, don’t you know that?”

“I had no pencil.”

The teacher started forward. “Mind out, now, you! Mind how you talk to the priest.” His cane twitched, as if about to take the law into its own hands. “I’ll give it to him, Father.”

“No, let him sit down.”

“What, Father?” The teacher stared. He was a beefy young fellow, with a shiny face and muscles which bulged under the tight sleeves of his jacket. Father Conroy was seized with that rage which authority aroused in him. He glared at the teacher, who for a moment felt he would be physically assaulted.

“He needs it, Father,” he murmured obsequiously, and he came closer, anxious to impart a confidence, to draw the priest into an adult conspiracy of reason. “A bad home he comes from, Father Fitzmaurice will tell you.”

“Put away your cane, mister,” Father Conroy burst out. And because he could think of no justification for his words, and because he was overmastered by his rage and there was no ground left between him and that shiny face, he turned and slammed his way out of the school.

Well, maybe there were better ways than the cane of compensating for bad homes, but he did not seem to have found one for Tomás. The burly young teacher (whom he had never pulled with afterward) was proved right after all. During the years Father Conroy came to that school and perched himself on the front desk to take the catechism class, it was Tomás’s face he always addressed. Most of the time it was closed to him, but once or twice, catching it unawares, he found it had opened a little and was waiting for the thread of a story to unwind, a story from the Old Testament, Samson perhaps, or David and Goliath. At his look, the face would close at once, but the interest remained, betrayed only by an occasional impatient shift of the head on the cupped hand.