The Valentine's Day farce lasted an entire day.
By dinner, quite a few students felt that the day's relatively light lessons had not used up all their energy.
So they found something else to vent their youthful vigor on-counting who in the school had received the most love letters and cards.
There was no room for doubt: something this pointless had to be the work of the Weasley twins.
But although Harry thought it was utterly pointless, it would have been a lie to say he was not curious about who had received the most love letters.
After dinner, the preliminary results came out.
Leaving aside Lockhart's forty-six cards, which might or might not have been real, Fred and George, along with their best friend Lee Jordan, tallied up the top three boys and girls in the school by the number of love letters they had received.
The boys' side was relatively uninteresting. Young girls were, after all, rather reserved. Even Roger Davies, who had received the most love letters, had only seven.
Cedric, in second place, was not far behind Davies, with six.
Harry came third. Besides the three he had received that morning and the musical message at noon, he had received one more, bringing his total to five.
Compared with the girls, the numbers were not even in the same league. The three boys combined had received fewer than the girl in third place alone.
The girl who had received the most love letters at school that day-and could also be called the most popular-was Miss Gemma Farley, Slytherin's seventh-year girl prefect.
As one of the few Slytherin students spoken well of by all three other houses, and the school's wicked head girl, Miss Farley had received a full twenty-seven cards and love letters.
That was an