All for the Greater Good

"Dumbledore," Horace said after they had left the hospital wing and there were no students around. He walked alongside Dumbledore, hesitantly rubbing his hands as he hinted in a low voice at the suspicion from earlier. "Given the current situation... if something happened to you, who would benefit the most?"

"You suspect Professor Allen Harris?" The blue eyes behind Dumbledore's half-moon glasses looked rather surprised.

"Dumbledore, you said that. I never said it was him!" Slughorn frowned. The reason he had not directly voiced his suspicion of Allen was that he had not wanted to say it in front of McGonagall, Professor Snape, and the others. With so many people around, gossip could easily spread, and once it reached Allen's ears, facing him again would be rather awkward. He had not expected Dumbledore to say it outright.

"Impossible. Mr. Harris would never do such a thing. Absolutely impossible!" Professor McGonagall refuted him firmly, shaking her head in disapproval.

McGonagall had watched Allen grow into what he was today over all these years. Even if she disagreed with some of his views and had once misunderstood him, after personally experiencing the incident where Allen stopped Umbridge from trying to seize Dumbledore's personal belongings, she did not believe Allen could be rotten to this extent. Though his occasional fondness for pranks, and the time he tried to make her write a self-criticism during the Ministry of Magic incident, had made her rather furious... and then there was Quidditch. Allen was not some second-generation You-Know-Who who disliked Flying Broomsticks. For the sake of fairness, he had been willing to donate a large sum of Galleons to buy Flying Broomsticks for every House's Quidditch team. How could someone like that possibly poison the wine? McGonagall, who had been a main player on the school