Tabitha was fairly hypnotized. She could not keep her eyes off him whenever the opportunity to look in his direction came to her, which fortunately was not often, as she sat in the front seat of the outside row, while his desk was towards the rear of the room in the same row, and they were both in nearly all the same classes, though he was obviously some two or three years older than she. However, he was further advanced in arithmetic, and recited in a different class, so she could watch him during that lesson while he was working at the blackboard, or sitting on the recitation bench in front of the whole school. He had the loveliest red-brown curls and big, red-brown eyes with long, heavy lashes! To be sure, his face was freckled, but he was always laughing and one forgot the freckles in watching his flashing white teeth or the dimples that came and went in his round cheeks. Tabitha did not know that he hated these dimples almost as badly as she did her name, and that his beautiful curls were a great trial to him, as such things are to all boys of that tender age; but she did know that he was different from any boy she had ever seen, and so she worshipped him from afar. Besides, he had the _grandest_ name! Why had she never heard of Jerome when she gave Tom the name of Dionysius Ulysses Humphrey Llewelyn? Maybe it wasn't too late yet. Oh, she had forgotten--how could she ever forget! And the crimson blood mounted her cheeks as she remembered that unhappy day in the long ago when she had marched up one side of the street and down the other and told the people that her name was Tabitha Catt. Tom and the Carsons and Miss Brooks had been very kind to her after that dreadful affair, and when she had gone back to school the children never once referred to the beautiful name that had been so ruthlessly snatched away from her, but they played with her just as if nothing had happened and even spoke the hateful word, Tabitha, with such a gentleness that it lost some of its sting. Carrie adopted Tom's pet name for her, so in time others of the children had taken it up and she was more frequently Puss than Tabitha; for all of which she was deeply grateful. Still, she could not help wishing that Tom's name could have been Jerome. That did sound so splendid! But Tom in her eyes was just as nice as Jerome Vane, even if he was solemn and shy while Jerome was laughing and debonair. The new scholar had been in school just one week when one rainy day at recess while the children were playing quietly inside the building, as the weather was too forbidding to permit the usual games in the yard, Tabitha's sharp ears caught a snatch of conversation among the boys busy drawing horrible cartoons on the blackboard, and one of the speakers was her idol, Jerome Vane. "Who's that black-haired kid that signs her name as 'T. C.' in the arithmetic class?" the new boy asked. "Oh, that's Tabitha Catt."