“It’s a beautiful name,” she said, and, not changing her attitude, continued to gaze upon him. “Why in the world don’t you eat your food?” he asked, impatiently. He had become but too well aware that Cornelia was attracting a covertly derisive attention; and he began to think her a bothersomely eccentric child. Following her noticeable elegance and her diatonic laughter, her dreamy attitude in the presence of untouched waffles was conspicuous, and he was annoyed in particular by the interest with which two occupants of a table against the opposite wall were regarding him and Cornelia. One of these interested persons was another of his pupils, a girl of Cornelia’s age. He could not fail to note how frequently she glanced at him, and after each glance whispered seriously with her mother across their table; then both would stare surreptitiously at him and his rapt vis-à-vis. There was something like a disapproving surveillance—even something inimical—in their continuing observation, he thought; nor was he remote from the truth in this impression. Cornelia’s schoolmate was enjoying herself, excited by what she had easily prevailed upon a nervous mother to see as a significant contretemps. Moreover, the daughter had just imparted to the mother a secret known to half the school, but not to Mrs. Cromwell. “Crazy about him!” the schoolmate whispered. “Absolutely! She picked up the stub of his pencil and kept it, and a piece of an old broken pipe. We teased her, and she got red and ran away. She won’t speak to us for days if we say anything about him she doesn’t like. Everybody knows she’s simply frantic. Did you ever see such airs as she’s been putting on, and did you hear her calling him her ‘dear man’ and talking about ‘I do assure you’? And then looking at him like _that_—the poor smack!” “I never in all my life saw anything like it!” the mother returned, her brow dark and her eyes wide. “She looked straight at us and never made the slightest sign when we bowed to her! The idea of as careful a woman as Mrs. Cromwell allowing her daughter to get into such a state, in the first place, is very shocking to me; and in the second, to permit her to come here, at her age, and lunch in public with a man she’s in such a state _about_—a man supposed to be her teacher and old enough to be almost her grandfather—I simply can’t imagine what she means by it.” The schoolmate giggled. “Cornelia’s mother? Don’t you believe it. Mrs. Cromwell doesn’t know a thing about it.” “Then she _ought_ to know, and immediately. If one of my daughters behaved like that, I should certainly be thankful to any one who informed me of it. I certainly——” “_Look!_” the schoolmate whispered, profoundly stirred. “Look at her _now_!”