twenty-five minutes to nine
_ 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 -LRB- hearing what she had to tell -RRB- insisted on her taking the journey with him to the court the next morning . This evidence virtually decided the trial .