"Sorry," Tamara said solemnly. "Did you find the Peke?"

"Of course," her aunt said serenely. "He got locked in the fruit cellar by mistake when Mildred was fetching some peach preserves. He didn't really run away. When I told Mildred where he was, she hurried right home to let him out."

"I wonder if she'll be able to coax him out. He's probably enjoying his vacation from that eternal fussing," Tamara said with a grin.

She never doubted for an instant that the dog would be exactly where Aunt Elizabeth said he would be. As a child she'd accepted as a matter of course that her aunt could see where she'd misplaced her doll or lost her favorite hair ribbon. Aunt Elizabeth had once explained to Tamara that she would break her arm in the next few days, but that she mustn't be frightened and would be quite well again in a few weeks. Tamara hadn't even been surprised when the rope on her swing had broken and she'd had to be rushed to the hospital with a fractured radius.

She'd thought all grownups possessed these powers until she'd started school and been rudely disillusioned. She'd discovered that Aunt Elizabeth was "different." When a bully called her aunt a witch, Tamara had socked him so hard his nose began to bleed copiously and he'd run crying to the teacher.

Tamara had learned soon, though, that she couldn't fight all the kids who taunted her. So she'd come to behave with a cool reserve that had been her armor ever since. She'd cared much more passionately when the other children had hurled insults at Aunt Elizabeth than when they'd jeered at her for her illegitimacy. Aunt Elizabeth, in her infinite wisdom, had prepared her for the latter possibility. But because she'd lived with her own strange powers so long that they'd become second nature, it never occurred to her to warn Tamara against the venom of those who were frightened or skeptical of her gift. For years Tamara had been silently, yet fiercely resentful of the condemnation of her aunt by her peers, until she'd come to realize just how unusual a gift Elizabeth possessed.