“Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,” cried the girl, “that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and—and something worse than all—as I have been from my cradle; I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my deathbed.”
“I pity you!” said Rose in a broken voice. “It wrings my heart to hear you!”
“God bless you for your goodness!” rejoined the girl. “If you knew what I am sometimes you would pity me, indeed. But I have stolen away from those who would surely murder me if they knew I had been here to tell you what I have overheard. Do you know a man named Monks?”
“No,” said Rose.
“He knows you,” replied the girl; “and knew you were here, for it was by hearing him tell the place that I found you out.”
“I never heard the name,” said Rose.
“Then he goes by some other amongst us,” rejoined the girl, “which I more than thought before. Some time ago, and soon after Oliver was put into your house on the night of the robbery, I—suspecting this man—listened to a conversation held between him and Fagin in the dark. I found out from what I heard that Monks—the man I asked you about, you know—”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I understand.”
“—That Monks,” pursued the girl, “had seen him accidentally with two of our boys on the day we first lost him, and had known him directly to be the same child that he was watching for, though I couldn’t make out why. A bargain was struck with Fagin, that if Oliver was got back he should have a certain sum; and he was to have more for making him a thief, which this Monks wanted for some purpose of his own.”
“For what purpose?” asked Rose.