Sybil. "The people are not disciplined; their action will not
be, cannot be, coherent and uniform; these are riots in which you
are involved, not revolutions; and you will be a victim, and not a
sacrifice."

Gerard looked thoughtful, but not anxious: after a momentary pause,
he said, "We must not be scared at a few arrests, Sybil. These are
hap-hazard pranks of a government that wants to terrify, but is itself
frightened. I have not counselled, none of us have counselled, this stir
at Birmingham. It is a casualty. We were none of us prepared for it. But
great things spring from casualties. I say the police were beaten and
the troops alarmed; and I say this was done without organization and in
a single spot. I am as much against feeble deeds as you can be, Sybil;
and to prove this to you, our conversation at the moment you arrived,
was to take care for the future that there shall be none. Neither vain
words nor feeble deeds for the future," added Gerard, and he moved to
depart.

Sybil approached him with gentleness; she took his hand as if to bid him
farewell; she retained it for a moment, and looked at him steadfastly in
the face, with a glance at the same time serious and soft. Then throwing
her arms round his neck and leaning her cheek upon his breast, she
murmured, "Oh! my father, your child is most unhappy."

"Sybil," exclaimed Gerard in a tone of tender reproach, "this is
womanish weakness; I love, but must not share it."

"It may be womanish," said Sybil, "but it is wise: for what should make
us unhappy if not the sense of impending, yet unknown, danger?"

"And why danger?" said Gerard.

"Why mystery?" said Sybil. "Why are you ever pre-occupied and involved
in dark thoughts, my father? It is not the pressure of business, as you
will perhaps tell me, that occasions this change in a disposition so
frank and even careless. The pressure of affairs is not nearly as great,
cannot he nearly as great, as in the early period of your assembling,
when the eyes of the whole country were on you, and you were in
communication with all parts of it. How often have you told me that
there was no degree of business which you found irksome? Now you are
all dispersed and scattered: no discussions, no committees, little
correspondence--and you yourself are ever brooding and ever in conclave,
with persons too who I know, for Stephen has told me so, are the
preachers of violence: violence perhaps that some of them may preach,
yet