"It's like coming into a new house," she told him, with a quick little smile that momentarily cut across her apprehensive look. "Or rather like coming home after you've been away for a long time. You're very happy, but everything is a little strange. It takes you a while to get used to it." Now that she mentioned it, he realized that there was a kind of uncertainty about her movements, gestures, and expressions, like a person convalescent after a long sickness and just now able to get up and about. She had combed out her hair so that it fell to her shoulders, and she was still in her bare feet, giving her a diminutive and girlish appearance that he found very attractive. He felt a growing impatience with the possible dangers threatening him, although he knew such an attitude to be unwise. He'd smash anyone who tried to harm her or keep them apart! She barely sipped her drink, and then put it aside. "Back of everything, is Mrs. Carr," she began abruptly. "It was she who brought Mrs. Gunnison and Evelyn Sawtelle together, and that one act speaks volumes. Women are invariably secretive about their magic. They work alone. A little knowledge is passed from the elder to the younger ones, especially from mother to daughter, but even that is done grudgingly and with suspicions. This is the only case Mrs. Gunnison knew of--I learned most of this from watching her soul--in which three women actually co-operated. It is an event of revolutionary importance, betokening Heaven knows what for the future. Even now I have only an inkling of Mrs. Carr's ambitions, but they involve vast augmentation of her present powers. For almost three quarters of a century she has been weaving her plans. Her real age is closer to eighty than seventy." Tansy's voice was rapid, and she had grown pale again. Norman was listening intently. "She seems an innocent and rather foolish old lady, strait-laced yet ineffectual--but that's only part of a disguise, along with her cooing voice and simpering manners. She's the cleverest actress imaginable. Underneath she's hard as nails--cold where Mrs. Gunnison would be hot, ascetic where Mrs. Gunnison would be a slave to appetites. But she has her own deeply hidden hungers, nevertheless. She is a great admirer of Puritan Massachusetts. Sometimes I have the queerest feeling that she is planning, by some unimaginable means, to reestablish that witch-ridden, so-called theocratic community in this present day and age. "She rules the other two by fear. In a way they are little more than her apprentices. You know something of Mrs. Gunnison, so you will understand what it means when I say that I have seen Mrs. Gunnison's thoughts go weak with terror because she was afraid that she had slightly offended Mrs. Carr." * * * * *