Ron threw the ball of toast he had crushed in his hand onto the table, leaned forward, braced both hands against the tabletop, and stared straight at Harry with his blue eyes.
"Hagrid may be a little... well... unusual in his tastes, but he would never kill anyone! Much less control spiders to hurt people! Think about the things he raised—Norbert! A dragon! The look on his face when he held it, the— the— he raised it like his own child! He is not the kind of person who would use his own 'child' as a weapon! There has to be some misunderstanding here! It must be that bastard Malfoy framing him, just like he framed you!"
Ron's voice rose half an octave with agitation, then he forcibly lowered it again. He guiltily glanced toward Madam Pince in the depths of the library and, seeing that she did not seem to have noticed them, quietly let out a breath before lowering his voice further, though his pace did not slow. "Think about it—how many years has Hagrid been at Hogwarts? Fifty years! If there were something wrong with him, would Dumbledore not have noticed? Dumbledore is—"
"Dumbledore can misjudge people too." Hermione's voice was quiet but level, so level that it sounded as though she were reading from a manuscript written long ago, every word carefully weighed over and over. She spoke, but her fingers did not stop tapping on the table—tap, tap, tap, tap—like a precision instrument running in the background, one that never needed to stop and never made mistakes.
Ron and Harry both looked at her.
Hermione did not look at them. Her gaze rested on the shelf behind Harry, on those thick, dull-colored old books whose gilded titles had long since faded. Her lips were pressed