plessness prostrated her. She sate her down upon
the steps before the door of that dreary house, within the railings of
that gloomy court, and buried her face in her hands: a wild vision
of the past and the future, without thought or feeling, coherence
or consequence: sunset gleams of vanished bliss, and stormy gusts of
impending doom.

The clock of St John's struck seven.

It was the only thing that spoke in that still and dreary square; it was
the only voice that there seemed ever to sound; but it was a voice from
heaven; it was the voice of St John.

Sybil looked up: she looked up at the holy building. Sybil listened:
she listened to the holy sounds. St John told her that the danger of her
father was yet so much advanced. Oh! why are there saints in heaven if
they cannot aid the saintly! The oath that Morley would have enforced
came whispering in the ear of Sybil--"Swear by the holy Virgin and by
all the saints."

And shall she not pray to the holy Virgin and all the saints? Sybil
prayed: she prayed to the holy Virgin and all the saints; and especially
to the beloved St John: most favoured among Hebrew men, on whose breast
reposed the divine Friend.

Brightness and courage returned to the spirit of Sybil: a sense of
animating and exalting faith that could move mountains, and combat
without fear a thousand perils. The conviction of celestial aid inspired
her. She rose from her sad resting-place and re-entered the house: only,
however, to provide herself with her walking attire, and then alone and
without a guide, the shades of evening already descending, this child of
innocence and divine thoughts, born in a cottage and bred in a cloister,
she went forth, on a great enterprise of duty and devotion, into the
busiest and the wildest haunts of the greatest of modern cities.

Sybil knew well her way to Palace Yard. This point was soon reached: she
desired the cabman to drive her to a Street in the Strand in which was
a coffee-house, where during the last weeks of their stay in London the
scanty remnants of the National Convention had held their sittings. It
was by a mere accident that Sybil had learnt this circumstance, for when
she had attended the meetings of the Convention in order to hear her
father's speeches, it was in the prime of their gathering and when their
numbers were great, and when they met in audacious rivalry opposite
that St Stephen's which they wished to supersede. This accidental
recollection ho