It was never clear when the tower clock first lost its nerve, only that it lost it with a punctuality bordering on the insolent: every night at 3:07 precisely it fell silent, and every morning Mr. Varga, the clockmaker, climbed the two hundred steps with the weary dignity of a man summoned to a deathbed that refused to be one. He cleaned the gears, replaced the springs and wrote to a colleague in the capital; the clock, unmoved by all this attention, went on stopping. The mayor, who counted lateness among the graver sins, took to airing his grievances to anyone unfortunate enough to cross the square.
Nina, who was ten and held grown-up explanations in polite suspicion, favored a simpler theory. A thing that occurs at the same minute every night, she reasoned, is not a fault but a visitor. And so, one frosty evening, she slipped out of the house with a flashlight and a flask of cocoa and settled behind the fountain to keep watch.
For hours the square offered her nothing but cold and the occasional opinion of a pigeon. Then, shortly after 3:06, there came a faint scraping from the tower, and a thin gray cat squeezed through a broken window with the air of a tenant returning to a long-held lease. It crossed the machinery with a clerk's indifference, curled itself into the hollow of the pendulum weight and, within a minute, the great clock held its breath.
Nina did not shout, nor give chase; she was far too contented. In the morning she merely asked Mr. Varga whether he happened to own a basket. Together they mended the window and set a cushioned bed beside the pendulum, and from then on the clock never faltered. The town, which had always preferred a good name to a good explanation, called the cat Minute.