With two weeks left until Christmas, the rain that had lingered for over a month finally stopped. The sky cleared, turning a bright, dazzling egg-white color.
Weather like this was so rare in the United Kingdom that quite a few people at school felt much better simply because of it.
Everyone in Gryffindor was in particularly high spirits.
In the last Quidditch match of the term not long before, they had beaten Slytherin.
But compared with Hufflepuff, whom everyone had considered stronger before the match, Slytherin had actually proved a tougher opponent.
No one knew who had let it slip, but Muggle-made heat patches had now become standard equipment for Quidditch players in every house, with a large box for each person.
There was no helping it. With over a month of rain, both matches and training had been far too difficult without them.
The Slytherin students had wrestled with this a little.
Slytherin was almost entirely pure-blood; at least, all its current students were pure-bloods. Unlike the other houses, where students from Muggle families brought some goodwill or interest toward the Muggle world, Slytherin resisted the Muggle world to a certain extent.
This was clear from the fact that not a single Slytherin took Muggle Studies and Protection as an elective. Even young wizards from Muggle families sometimes chose this subject out of curiosity.
Hermione, for instance.
Although the theory of wizard supremacy was no longer popular, quite a few people in Slytherin still believed in it.
They even looked down on wizards from Muggle families, let alone Muggles who could not use magic.
Under these circumstances, using Muggle-made heat patches was rather hard for them to accept.
But they could not do without them, either.
With the rain continuing, students from the other houses were all using these