Later in the morning, the people began to move about, and after a while the streets were full of sightseers. It was possible now to learn something of what happened on the previous day and during the night. There had been fierce fighting in places. Soldiers were hurrying from the Curragh, from the North of Ireland, from England. The thing was serious ... the rebels had seized various strategic points, and were determined to fight hardly. During the night, realising that Stephen's Green was a dangerous place to be in, they had left it for the shelter of the College of Surgeons. Some of them were still there, sniping from safe points.

Henry went out and wandered about the streets. If there were soldiers in Dublin, there were very few, and the rebels still had possession of the city. He listened to the comments of the people who passed him, and as he listened, he realised that there was resentment everywhere against the Sinn Feiners. Behind one of the gates of the Park, a Sinn Feiner was lying face downwards in the hole he had made to be a trench, and the crowd climbed up the railings to gape at him. A youth thrust his way through the people and peered at the dead man, and then he turned to the crowd and said to them, "Let's get the poor chap out and bury him!" A girl looked at him resentfully, and hurried to a towsled woman standing on the kerb, and told her what the youth had said, and instantly the woman rushed at him and hit him about the head and back. "No, ye'll not get him out," she yelled at him. "Let him lie there an' rot like the poor soldiers!"

"They forgot, the Sinn Feiners, that these women's husbands and sons are at the Front!" Henry thought.

What madness was it that possessed them to rise? A little group of men and boys had set itself against a Power in the interests of people who did not desire their services. They could not hope to win the fight ... they had not the gratitude or the good wishes of the people for whom they were fighting. What were they going to do next? They had taken the Post Office and the College of Surgeons and other places because there was no one to prevent them from taking them ... but what were they going to do next? They could not, even the wildest of them, believe that this immunity from attack would last forever. Was there one among them with an idea of the future of Ireland, of the complexities of government?...

He wanted to get hold of a leader of them and ask him just what he proposed to do with Ireland?...