The girls hurried down to breakfast and then were plunged into the vortex of classes and lessons. In the middle of the morning, Juliet brought over Betty’s watch and not finding any one in the suite left it in plain view on the table.
Lunch over, Hilary, Lilian and Betty who were to recite in senior Latin the first hour in the afternoon, hurried upstairs to go over it together, while Cathalina, whose class in Cicero came later, strolled off to the library with her Cicero text.
“Of course we’d have to have a longer lesson than usual in this hard place,” growled Betty. “O, here’s my watch. Somebody brought it over. It’s stopped, of course. Did you change the clock, Hilary?”
“No, and I won’t bother to fix it till night. Allow about three minutes for the gain so far today.”
Betty set her watch, remarking that she would look at the clock in the recitation room and get it just right. They had just decided upon the rendering of a hard passage when a knock came at the door and Dorothy Appleton with two more senior girls came in to see how the girls’ translation accorded with theirs. And while they were all listening to Hilary as she read the disputed lines, a delegation of five others came in, Julia Merton in the lead. “Good,” said she, “we’re just in time, I see. There’s one line that doesn’t make any sense to me at all. How do you read it, Hilary?”
“Read the whole lesson, Hilary,” said Dorothy. “It’s so hard and has so many new words that I can’t remember them.”
“Mercy, no, child,” warned Julia. “Look at the clock. It’s time to go now, but—”
“No it isn’t,” said Hilary. “Our clock is twenty minutes fast, or nearly that. There’s plenty of time!”
“I thought I heard the bell as I came in.”
“It must have been for gym or something. I didn’t hear it,” said Lilian, “but then we don’t always hear it when our windows are down. Are you sure you didn’t fix the clock?”