"You finally decided to show up."
"Why do you always like disappearing?"
The moment he returned to the Common Room, Albert saw Fred, George, and Lee Jordan turn to give him resentful looks in unison. The Weasley twins flanked him and pressed down on his shoulders, while Lee Jordan gave him a light push from behind, finally forcing him into an armchair.
"What has you all so excited?" Albert asked with a smile. He had a pretty good idea that something had happened.
"Bill wrote to say he took a look around Diagon Alley for us and found some shopkeepers willing to rent out or sell their premises." Fred took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Albert. Inside was the information Bill had gathered and organized in his spare time.
Albert pulled out the parchment inside and discovered that the bulging envelope even contained a simple map of Diagon Alley. It roughly marked the locations of shops up for sale, their sizes, asking prices, owners' names, and contact addresses.
It seemed that giving Bill some Galleons to help out had been the right choice.
Albert could certainly have had the house-elf Dobby gather information for him, but the results would never have been this detailed, and Dobby might expose his connection to Albert because of it.
Of course, there were other reasons as well.
Dobby had been rather busy lately. If he left the school to work for Albert, Gryffindor Tower would suffer a terrible disaster.
This was actually related to Hermione.
Since Hermione still had no intention of giving up on freeing house-elves and had put her beliefs into action, the house-elves had come to dislike Gryffindor Tower and refused to clean there. As a result, all the cleaning in Gryffindor Tower now depended on Dobby.