Grimaldi found his wife, as he had expected, very much terrified at his being so late; nor were her fears allayed by his wild demeanour and the appearance of the blow on his temple. To her hurried inquiries he gave the best answers that occurred to him, and being unwilling to give her any unnecessary alarm, merely remarked, that he had a fall from his gig, which had made him giddy and uncomfortable. The pains he afterwards took to keep the real truth from coming to her knowledge were infinite. Every newspaper that came into the house he carefully searched, to ascertain that it contained no paragraph relative to the robbery; and so successful were his precautions, that she had not the least inkling of the circumstance until more than two years afterwards, upon their giving up the cottage at Finchley, and returning to town; when her first exclamation was, "Oh, Joe, if I had only known this at the time, I never could have slept another night in Finchley!" This was exactly what Grimaldi had supposed, and he was not a little delighted to find that he had been enabled to remain during the whole of that time in a place to which he was very much attached, and where, in the society of his wife and child, he had spent some of the happiest hours of his existence. Grimaldi got very little sleep after the robbery, his thoughts turning all night upon the distressing consequences it seemed likely to involve. That Hamilton was one of the men, he felt pretty well sure: the voice and defect in the left hand were strong proofs against him. Added to this, there was other evidence, circumstantial, it is true, but still very weighty. It was plain, from the knowledge which one of the thieves possessed relative to the note, that he or some one connected with him had been at the tavern in the earlier part of the night, and had there closely watched his actions. The doubtful character of Archer, and his suspicious looks and manner, had struck him often; the thieves had been waiting three nights, and for three nights Hamilton had been absent from his usual place of resort. The more he thought of these things, the more sure he felt that Hamilton was a highwayman: then came the reflection, that if, upon his evidence, he was sentenced to death, it would most probably involve the fate of his young wife, of whose meekness and gentleness he had seen so many tokens. He tossed and tumbled through the night, meditating upon these things over and over again; he rose the following morning feverish and dejected, trusting the thieves might escape rather than that he should be the means of bringing any of his fellow-creatures to a violent death, or dooming others to living and hopeless wretchedness.