"She shouldn't be so silly then," said Maudie. "What do dogs know about its being Sunday, and treats? I know Hoodie always spoils _our_ Sundays, and we're better than dogs." "I don't love you, naughty Maudie. I don't love _any_ body," screamed Hoodie. "It certainly doesn't look as if you did, and very soon nobody will love you, Miss Hoodie, if you go on so," said Martin, virtuously. "I wish," said Duke, the second twin, "I wish papa would build anoder _gate_ big house and put Hoodie to live there all alone, don't you, Maudie? A gate big house where not nobody could hear her sceaming." Great applause followed this brilliant idea--but the laughter only increased Hoodie's fury. Duke was the next she turned upon. "I don't love you, naughty, ugly Duke," she screamed. "I don't love _any_ body. Go away evybody, go away, go _away_, go AWAY." Such was Hoodie--poor Hoodie--at five years old! What had made her so naughty? That was the question that puzzled everybody concerned--not forgetting Hoodie herself. "I didn't make myself. 'Tisn't my fault. God should have made Hoodie gooder," she would say defiantly. And was it not a puzzle? There was Maudie, just as nice and good a little girl as one would wish to see, and Hec and Duke, both comfortable, good-natured little fellows--all three, children to whom things came right, and whose presence in the world seemed as natural and pleasant a thing as that of birds in the trees or daisies in the grass. Why should not Hoodie be like them? She was born in July--one bright sunny day when all the world was rejoicing--and little Maudie had been so pleased to have a baby sister, and her godmother had begged that she might be called "Julian," and everybody had, for a time, made much of her. But, alas, as the years went on, they told a different tale--governesses and nurses, sister and brothers, it was the same story with all--Hoodie's temper was the strangest and the worst that ever a child had made herself and other people miserable by. "I could really fancy," said Maudie one day, "I could really fancy, if there _were_ such things as fairies, you know--that one of them had been offended at not being asked to Hoodie's christening." And when Hoodie grew old enough to hear fairy tales, this speech of Maudie's came back to her mind, and she wondered, with the strange unexpressed bewilderment of a child, if indeed there were some mystery about her naughtiness--some spell cast upon her which it was hopeless to try to break. For she knew she was naughty, very naughty--she never thought of denying it. Only deep down _somewhere_ in her--where, she could not have told--there was a feeling that she did not _want_ to be naughty--she did not _like_ being naughty--there was a mistake about her somehow or somewhere, which nobody could understand or ever would, and which it never entered her head to try to explain to any one.