“Just to go home again and see gran’ther, and have him say he believed in me and loved me once more, I’d be willing to lay down my life the next moment!” little Eva sobbed to herself in the long, wakeful hours of the night before she ran away from the asylum. With the first dawning of reason and memory had come a pathetic yearning for home--that strange malady, nostalgia, that sometimes breaks the heart. Mixed with her pleasure in the daily offerings of her unknown lover, was the longing for the old home and gran’ther, and all the simple pleasures of the farm. There had been drawbacks, it is true, in the spinster’s waspish temper, and the spiteful envy of her cousins, but gran’ther’s love atoned for it all. In his quiet way he had tried to make it up to his little pet. That night a terrible yearning seized upon her, a longing for the old man that she could not overcome. In her own mind Eva was sure he must have forgiven her before now, even if not convinced of her innocence, for he had a gusty temper, that soon became sunny again; and she had never known him to bear malice toward any but the Ludingtons, who had wronged him by unjust accusations during the war. “If I could just get back to him again--if I could lay my face on his old gray head and twine my arms around his neck and say, ‘I love you still, dear; you did not mean to be so cruel,’ I know he would say, ‘Little Eva, come home; I have missed you, and I am not angry any more!’” she sobbed to her lonely pillow, that was wet with the tears that had fallen from her lovely eyes. She could not sleep, she could not rest; she seemed to hear gran’ther calling her through the darkness of the night, stretching yearning arms to his little pet. She moaned feverishly: “He wants me as bad as I do him! I will go back to gran’ther! I will run away!” All her love for the new friends she had made at the asylum, among the doctors and attendants, seemed to fade away before this mighty yearning for the old home and love. She feared to ask leave to go home lest she meet with a refusal. She supposed she had to stay at the asylum all her life, little dreaming that Doctor St. Clair had said she would soon be well enough to get her discharge. “I will run away!” she decided, for she knew that some others of the patients had done the same thing since she came there. Some had been detected and brought back, but others had never returned. “Gran’ther will never let them take me back, for I don’t think I am much crazy now,” she thought meekly, and before daylight she had stealthily made up a bundle of all she wanted to take with her--the books and verses from her unknown lover, that had contributed so largely to the restoration of her reason. That morning she was missing. She had craftily effected her escape and gotten away on a train before her flight was discovered.