Very glad, indeed, he was to hear what she told him. For the old gentleman, when Oliver had disappeared with the money he had given him to take to the bookseller, had been reluctant to think the boy he had befriended was, after all, a liar and a thief. He had advertised for him, but the only result had been a call from Mr. Bumble, who told him terrible tales of Oliver's wickedness. To find now, after all this time, that Oliver had not run away, and that Mr. Bumble's tales were lying ones, was a joyful surprise to Mr. Brownlow. After he had heard the whole, and when Oliver had gone into the garden, Miss Rose told him of Nancy's visit and of the man Monks who still pursued the boy to do him harm. It was fortunate that she had come to Mr. Brownlow, for, as it happened, he knew a great deal about Monks and his evil life. Years before the old gentleman himself had been a friend of Oliver's father. He knew all about his death in a foreign country, and 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.