"Here's a watch I've bought for you. It belonged to a lady."
"Oh, what a beauty!" cried Milly, her eyes sparkling with eager delight as she looked at the pretty bauble.
"Well, it's yours now, my girl. I promised you should have one when the young 'un came."
"Thank you, Jim," said Milly, returning to the bed, with the present in her hand.
"He's just like me, Milly," said the Tenderhearted Oysterman; "he's as soft as a piece of putty. But I can't see how that watch is a dose, Jim."
"I gave Dick Handfield five pounds for that watch," said Jim, "and I paid him for it with a forged note."
At these words, Milly, who had been looking at the watch, and examining it with the pleasure of a child when it receives a new toy, dropped it upon the bed, with a heavy sigh.
"Then I took him to Old Flick's, and Old Flick gave him five sovereigns for the note. There was a man in the store when Dick Handfield changed the note, and Old Flick, who knew all about the lay, asked Dick Handfield all sorts of questions and regularly confused him. That's a pretty good dose for him, I think. I shall ask him to-morrow for the last time to join us. If he refuses, Old Flick shall give him in charge for passing a forged note, and the man who was in the store at the time will be the witness. Handfield will be glad enough to join us when he finds he's in the web. He'd sooner go up the country with us than go to quod--if it was only for the sake of that woman of his, that white-faced piece of virtue he calls his wife."
"Alice her name is," said the Tenderhearted Oysterman, sneeringly. "She's as much his wife as I am."
"It's a lie, Milly, a lie!" whispered Grif, in an agony of rage and despair at what he had heard. "She is his wife!" Oh, if he could get away from the room to tell Alice of the danger which surrounded her husband! He dug his nails in his hand, and his faithful heart beat furiously.