d was half-crazed in these first days in the extremity
of her grief; the nuns tried to console her, but she was at
first beyond consolation. She did not know what to do with her
sense of misery, her hopeless yearning, with the sudden
darkness which had fallen upon her bright life, and where she
was left to grope without one hand stretched out by which she
could reach back as it were, into the past, and grasp some
familiar reality that should help her to a comprehension of
this strange new world in which she found herself. We hear
often enough of the short life of childish troubles, quickly
excited, and as quickly forgotten--true enough perhaps of the
griefs isolated, so to speak, in the midst of long days of
happiness. But the grief that is not isolated? The grief over
which the child cries itself to sleep every night, and which
wakes with it in the morning, saddening and darkening with its
own gloom the day which ought to be so joyous? In such a grief
as this, there is, perhaps, for the time it lasts, no sorrow
so sad, so acute, so hopeless, as a child's. For us, who with
our wide experience have lived through so much, and must
expect to live through so much more, a strength has risen up
out of our very extremity, as we have learnt to believe in a
beyond, in a future that must succeed the darkest hour. But a
child, as a rule, has neither past nor future; it lives in the
present. The past lies behind, already half forgotten in to-
day's happiness or trouble; the future is utterly wide, vague,
and impracticable, in nowise modifying or limiting the sorrow
which, to its unpractised imagination, can have no ending.
When a child has learnt to live in the past, or the future,
rather than in the present, it has learnt one of the first and
saddest of life's experiences--a lesson so hard in the
learning, so impossible to unlearn in all the years to come.

A lesson that our Madelon, too, must soon take to heart, in
the midst of such dreary distasteful surroundings, with a past
so bright to look back upon, with a future which she can fill
with any amount of day-dreams, of whatever hue she pleases--a
lesson therefore, which she is not long in acquiring, but with
the too usual result, a most weary impatience of the present.
The first violence of her grief exhausted itself in time, as
was only natural, and something of her old energy and spirit
began to show itself again; but the change was not much for
the better. She did not mo