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 mope nor pine, that was not her way; but she became possessed with a spirit of restless petulance, which at first, indeed, was only another phase of unhappiness, but which, not being recognized as such, presently developed into a most decided wilfulness.  She turned impatiently from the nun’s well-meant kindness and efforts to console her, which somehow were not what she wanted—­not that, but something so different, poor child!—­she was cross, peevish, fractious without intending it, scarcely knowing why; the nuns set her down as a perverse unamiable child:  and so it happened, that she had not been many weeks in the convent before she came to be regarded with general disfavour and indifference instead of with the kindly feeling that had at first been shown to the forlorn little stranger.

Graham had indeed wasted some pity on her, in imagining her under the immediate control of her aunt.  The Superior had far too many things to think about for her to trouble herself with any direct superintendence of her little niece; Madelon hardly ever saw her, and in fact, of the convent life in general she knew but little.  Her lessons she soon began to do with the other children in the class, and for the rest she was placed under the special care of one of the younger Sisters, Soeur Lucie by name.