“Well, then,” said the superintendent, “you can set it forward ten minutes when you reach home; and if to-morrow morning you compare the other clocks with it, I think you will find that not all of them are wrong.”
Arla sat quiet for a moment, and then she said: “I think I shall not care any more to compare the clocks of Rondaine with my little rose-clock. If the people are satisfied with their own clocks, whether they are fast or slow, and do not care to know exactly when Christmas Day begins, I can do nobody any good by listening to the different strikings and then looking at my own little clock, with a night-lamp by it.”
“Especially,” said the superintendent, with a smile, “when you are not sure that your rose-clock is right. But if you bring here your little clock and your key on any day when the sun is shining, I will set it to the time shadowed on the sun-dial, or show you how to do it yourself.”
“Thank you very much,” said Arla, and she took her leave.
As she walked home, she lifted the lid of her basket and looked at her little rose-clock. “To think of it!” she said. “That you should be sometimes too fast and sometimes too slow! And, worse than that, to think that some of the other clocks have been right and you have been wrong! But I do not feel like altering you to-day. If you go fast sometimes, and slow sometimes, you must be right sometimes, and one of these days, when I take you to be compared with the sun-dial, perhaps you will not have to be altered so much.”
Arla went to bed that night quite tired with her long walks, and when she awoke it was broad daylight. “I do not know,” she said to herself, “exactly when Christmas began, but I am very sure that the happy day is here.”
“Do you lie awake in the morning as much as you used to?” asked Arla’s mother, a few weeks after the Christmas holidays.
“No, mother dear,” said Arla; “I now sleep with one of my windows shut, and I am no longer awakened by that chilly feeling which used to come to me in the early morning, when I would draw the bed-covers close about me and think how wrong were the clocks of Rondaine.”
And the little rose-clock never went to be compared with the sun-dial. “Perhaps you are right now,” Arla would say to her clock each day when the sun shone, “and I will not take you until some time when I feel very sure that you are wrong.”