moment. Having at last laid her hand on what she
wanted, she contrived so to lift the clock a few inches and drop it again
on the mantelpiece, as to set it going once more.

The next necessity was of course to move the hands on. Here again she was
met by an obstacle. There was a difficulty in opening the glass-case
which protected the dial. After uselessly searching for some instrument
to help her, she got from the footman (without telling him what she
wanted it for) a small chisel. With this, she opened the case--after
accidentally scratching the brass frame of it--and set the hands of the
clock by guess. She was flurried at the time; fearing that her mistress
would discover her. Later in the day, she found that she had
over-estimated the interval of time that had passed while she was trying
to put the clock right. She had, in fact, set it exactly _a quarter of an
hour too fast._

No safe opportunity of secretly putting the clock right again had
occurred, until the last thing at night. She had then moved the hands
back to the right time. At the hour of the evening when Mr. Dubourg had
called on her mistress, she positively swore that the clock was a quarter
of an hour too fast. It had pointed, as her mistress had declared, to
twenty-five minutes to nine--the right time then being, as Mr. Dubourg
had asserted, twenty minutes past eight.

Questioned why she had refrained from giving this extraordinary evidence
at the inquiry before the magistrate, she declared that in the remote
Cornish village to which she had gone the next day, and in which her
illness had detained her from that time, nobody had heard of the inquiry
or the trial. She would not have been then present to state the vitally
important circumstances to which she had just sworn, if the prisoner's
twin-brother had not found her out on the previous day--had not
questioned her if she knew anything about the clock--and had not (hearing
what she had to tell) insisted on her taking the journey with him to the
court the next morning.

This evidence virtually decided the trial. There was a great burst of
relief in the crowded assembly when the woman's statement had come to an
end.

She was closely cross-examined as a matter of course. Her character was
inquired into; corroborative evidence (relating to the chisel and the
scratches on the frame) was sought for and was obtained. The end of it
was that, at a late hour on the second evening, the jury acquitted the