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.
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