and amazement she stretched out her hands to gather them in and they were gone. The room was as it had been before, but the odour was not gone. For many minutes the fragrance of violets filled her nostrils. She was afraid to close her eyes again to bring back the vision, but the following day she tried again, and many times afterward. She tried different flowers, carnations and Chinese lilies. She could not always see the flowers, but she seldom failed with the odour. The game fascinated her so that she spent every moment that she could find alone in materializing flowers. Then came to her the desire to take the next step—to make other people realize her power. Her mother, being the least imaginative person she knew as well as the one most conveniently near, she decided to try with her. It was one evening when her father was not at home. Her mother was busy embroidering—one of those never to be finished articles of no conceivable use, which occupy the hands of women who have no active interest in life. Ruth was pretending to read. She dared not shut her eyes lest her mother should observe. But she bent unseeing eyes over her book and concentrated on the inner vision of the mystic—shutting out everything except the thought of violets. They were her mother’s favourite flower. For many seconds after she herself was surrounded by the odour of violets and could see them on her book, her 5mother did not speak. Then she looked up restlessly from her embroidery.

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“Have you been using perfume, Ruth?—you know I don’t approve of young girls—”

“No, Mother, I haven’t. I haven’t any to use.”

“I smell perfume—violet perfume—it’s more like real violets than just perfume—don’t you notice it? The whole room is heavy with it.”

She dropped her embroidery and moved about the room as if hunting for the flowers though she knew there were none there.

“It must have been my imagination—it’s gone now. Strange, I was sure I smelt violets. I must ask Doctor Gorton about it. It may be a dangerous symptom.”

Ruth did not speak. She was rather ashamed and not a 

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