had watched his older son's
career of shame with sorrow. The very trip he had made to the West
Indies had acquainted him with a crime Monks had committed there, from
which he had fled to England. But, while Mr. Brownlow knew of the
curious will Oliver's father had made, what had become of the baby to
which the latter referred he had never known. Now, from the story Miss
Rose told him, he was assured that Oliver was, indeed, this baby
half-brother of Monks.

But it was one thing to know this and quite another to enable Oliver to
prove it. The old gentleman was quick to see that they must get
possession of Monks and frighten him into confessing the fact--whose
only proofs had been lost when he threw the locket and ring into the
river. Mr. Brownlow, for this reason, agreed with Miss Rose that they
should both meet Nancy on the bridge on the coming Sunday to hear all
she had been able to find out.

They said not a word of this to Oliver, and when Sunday night came they
drove to the spot where Nancy had promised to meet them. She had kept
her word. She was there before them, and Mr. Brownlow heard her story
over again from her own lips.

But some one else was there, too, hidden behind a pillar, where he could
hear every word she said, and this listener was a spy of Fagin's.

Nancy had cried so much and acted so strangely that the old Jew had
grown suspicious and had set some one to watch her. And who do you
suppose this spy was? No other than the cowardly apprentice who had
bullied Oliver until he ran away from the undertaker's house. The
apprentice had finally run away, too, had come to London and begun a
wicked life. He was too big a coward to rob any one but little children
who had been sent to the shop to buy something, so Fagin had given him
spying work to do, and in this, being by nature a sneak, he proved very
successful.

The spy lay hid till he had heard all Nancy said; then he slipped out
and ran as fast as his legs would carry him back to Fagin. The latter
sent for Bill Sikes, knowing him to be the most brutal and bloodthirsty
ruffian of all, and told him what Nancy had done.

The knowledge, as the Jew expected, turned Sikes into a demon. He rushed
to where Nancy lived. She had returned and was asleep on her couch, but
she woke as he entered, and saw by his face that he meant to murder her.
Through all her evil career Nancy had been true to Sikes and would not
have betrayed him. But he would not listen now,