How familiar the old place looked outdoors, with the lilacs swelling and pushing out their purple buds in the sunshine. Eva remembered the last time she had been in the dear old kitchen that fatal Hallowe’en, when she had been refused leave to go on the hay ride. Oh, the changes since that night! And now gran’ther was dead, and she was being sent away, never to return, because Stony Ledge belonged to the twins now. They had made him disinherit her. He had told her so. She stifled a bursting sob, because she was afraid of a sharp reproof from the glowering spinster, and the tears brimmed over in her eyes and rained down her cheeks. A meal was soon spread, but Eva found it impossible to swallow a mouthful. All her hunger had fled, thinking of her terrible bereavement, and when the attendant had satisfied her appetite she followed her in silent despair out to the closed carriage in which she had come from Clarksburg. Several of the neighbors who had heard of Eva’s flight from the asylum, and her return, were waiting curiously about the door, and she looked at them with a wistful glance, as if imploring their pity. But no one spoke to her, no one held out a friendly hand, and in silence she passed to the carriage with a mute farewell in her heart to the dear old man lying dead upstairs. The carriage was closed, and as it rolled away along the pleasant country road she turned to the attendant with a passionate protest, crying: “I am not mad. Oh, no, no! I wish you would let me tell you all.” “Tell me what you choose, little Eva,” she replied, in her soothing way, and although she had believed the girl insane at first, she listened now in wonder to her pathetic story, smiling kindly at her vehement denial of the violent behavior Patty had laid at her door. “Do you not see now that I am not crazy? That they are sending me away through malice, not fear of me?” she cried. The kind attendant thought to herself: “How pitiful she talks! These lunatics they are deep ones, and could fool many a one with their tale of woe.” But aloud she only said: “Yes, dear; you have been treated very bad, and we must lay the case before the superintendent as soon as we get back to the asylum.” CHAPTER XV. THE WORLD WELL LOST. “Oh, how good you all have been to me, but I wish you had let me die and go to heaven with dear old gran’ther! There is no place for little Eva in all the wide, cruel world!” moaned the poor girl from among the pillows, where she had lain for a week following her return to Weston. She had met at least a welcome there, but she was ill and sinking with fatigue, so she scarcely heeded anything. For a week they doubted if she would live to take up the weary burden of her shadowed life again. But they knew that she was cured of her mental illness--knew it well without her pitiful remonstrances in the delirium of fever. “Little Eva is not crazy now! Gran’ther has forgiven her, and she is happy!”