CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Come now,” he cried, beaming around him. “Why all these
long faces?”
People swapped exasperated looks, but nobody answered.
“Don’t you people realize,” said Lockhart, speaking slowly, as
though they were all a bit dim, “the danger has passed! The culprit
has been taken away —”
“Says who?” said Dean Thomas loudly.
“My dear young man, the Minister of Magic wouldn’t have
taken Hagrid if he hadn’t been one hundred percent sure that he
was guilty,” said Lockhart, in the tone of someone explaining that
one and one made two.
“Oh, yes he would,” said Ron, even more loudly than Dean.
“I flatter myself I know a touch more about Hagrid’s arrest than
you do, Mr. Weasley,” said Lockhart in a self-satisfied tone.
Ron started to say that he didn’t think so, somehow, but stopped
in midsentence when Harry kicked him hard under the desk.
“We weren’t there, remember?” Harry muttered.
But Lockhart’s disgusting cheeriness, his hints that he had al-
ways thought Hagrid was no good, his confidence that the whole
business was now at an end, irritated Harry so much that he
yearned to throw Gadding with Ghouls right in Lockhart’s stupid
face. Instead he contented himself with scrawling a note to Ron:
Let’s do it tonight.
Ron read the message, swallowed hard, and looked sideways at
the empty seat usually filled by Hermione. The sight seemed to
stiffen his resolve, and he nodded.
The Gryffindor common room was always very crowded these
days, because from six o’clock onward the Gryffindors had no-
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