He looked round and saw her watching him.

“Yeah,” sighed Harry. “I do.”

“Remember the first time we played against each other, in the third year?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” said Harry, grinning. “You kept blocking me.”

“And Wood told you not to be a gentleman and knock me off my broom if you had to,” said Cho, smiling reminiscently. “I heard he got taken on by Pride of Portree, is that right?”

“Nah, it was Puddlemere United; I saw him at the World Cup last year.”

“Oh, I saw you there, too, remember? We were on the same campsite. It was really good, wasn’t it?”

The subject of the Quidditch World Cup carried them all the way down the drive and out through the gates. Harry could hardly believe how easy it was to talk to her—no more difficult, in fact, than talking to Ron and Hermione—and he was just starting to feel confident and cheerful when a large gang of Slytherin girls passed them, including Pansy Parkinson.

“Potter and Chang!” screeched Pansy, to a chorus of snide giggles. “Urgh, Chang, I don’t think much of your taste… at least Diggory was good-looking!”

The girls sped up, talking and shrieking in a pointed fashion with many exaggerated glances back at Harry and Cho, leaving an embarrassed silence in their wake. Harry could think of nothing else to say about Quidditch, and Cho, slightly flushed, was watching her feet.

“So… where d’you want to go?” Harry asked as they entered Hogsmeade. The High Street was full of students ambling up and down, peering into the shop windows and messing about together on the pavements.

“Oh… I don’t mind,” said Cho, shrugging. “Urn… shall we just have a look in the shops or something?”

They wandered towards Dervish and Banges. A large poster had been stuck up in the window and a few Hogsmeaders were looking at it. They moved aside when Harry and Cho approached and Harry found himself staring once more at the pictures of the ten escaped Death Eaters. The poster, “By Order of the Ministry of Magic,” offered a thousand-Galleon reward to any witch or wizard with information leading to the recapture of any of the convicts pictured.

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” said Cho in a low voice, gazing up at the pictures of the Death Eaters, “remember when that Sirius Black escaped, and there were Dementors all over Hogsmeade looking for him? And now ten Death Eaters are on the loose and there are no Dementors anywhere…”

“Yeah,” said Harry, tearing his eyes away from Bellatrix Lestrange’s face to glance up and down the High Street. “Yeah, that is weird.”

He wasn’t sorry that there were no Dementors nearby, but now he came to think of it, their absence was highly significant. They had not only let the Death Eaters escape, they weren’t bothering to look for them… it looked as though they really were outside Ministry control now.

The ten escaped Death Eaters were staring out of every shop window he and Cho passed. It started to rain as they passed Scrivenshaft’s; cold, heavy drops of water kept hitting Harry’s face and the back of his neck.

“Urn… d’you want to get a coffee?” said Cho tentatively, as the rain began to fall more heavily.

“Yeah, all right,” said Harry, looking around. “Where?”

“Oh, there’s a really nice place just up here; haven’t you ever been to Madam Puddifoot’s?” she said brightly, leading him up a side road and into a small teashop that Harry had never noticed before. It was a cramped, steamy little place where everything seemed to have been decorated with frills or bows. Harry was reminded unpleasantly of Umbridge’s office.

“Cute, isn’t it?” said Cho happily.

“Er… yeah,” said Harry untruthfully.

“Look, she’s decorated it for Valentine’s Day!” said Cho, indicating a number of golden cherubs that were hovering over each of the small, circular tables, occasionally throwing pink confetti over the occupants.

“Aaah…”

They sat down at the last remaining table, which was over by the steamy window. Roger Davies, the Ravenclaw Quidditch Captain, was sitting about a foot and a half away with a pretty blonde girl. They were holding hands. The sight made Harry feel uncomfortable, particularly when, looking around the teashop, he saw that it was full of nothing but couples, all of them holding hands. Perhaps Cho would expect him to hold her hand.

“What can I get you, m’dears?” said Madam Puddifoot, a very stout woman with a shiny black bun, squeezing between their table and Roger Davies’s with great difficulty.

“Two coffees, please,” said Cho.

In the time it took for their coffees to arrive, Roger Davies and his girlfriend had started kissing over their sugar bowl. Harry wished they wouldn’t; he felt that Davies was setting a standard with which Cho would soon expect him to compete. He felt his face growing hot and tried staring out of the window, but it was so steamed up he couldn’t see the street outside. To postpone the moment when he would have to look at Cho, he stared up at the ceiling as though examining the paintwork and received a handful of confetti in the face from their hovering cherub.

After a few more painful minutes, Cho mentioned Umbridge. Harry seized on the subject with relief and they passed a few happy moments abusing her, but the subject had already been so thoroughly canvassed during D.A. meetings it did not last very long. Silence fell again. Harry was very conscious of the slurping noises coming from the table next door and cast wildly around for something else to say.

“Er… listen, d’you want to come with me to the Three Broomsticks at lunchtime? I’m meeting Hermione Granger there.”

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Harry and Hermione stared at him. Ron looked darkly and meaningfully from one to the other.	\|	Cho raised her eyebrows.

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