Well, this was an unexpected turn of events. Ernest wasn't going to stop his daughter from buying a toad, particularly after she had settled so quickly on the stupid, ugly one that she had, but he did wonder over her choice. Surely she would lose interest in this little salvation charade sooner rather than later, and then she would be stuck with a toad she had no particular fondness for — or she could ditch him somewhere, Ernest supposed, and have no pet at all, which might be better for a little girl. How long could her attention span and her supposed charity really hold out?

Hopefully not terribly long; eventually she would realize that his story about the transfigured OWL students was entirely bullshit. While that hadn't bothered him when he'd created the tale, he hadn't really been expecting her to buy a toad; he'd supposed she would forget the conversation shortly after leaving the shop with some cute little fuzzy kitten and that would be the end of it. If she really held on to the toad as a pet, it was bound to come up sooner or later... unless she did manage to transfigure him into a person at some point. It had been done before, though of course a physical transfiguration could not affect the little toad's brain, and a personified toad probably wasn't destined for a very long life in its strange new form.

Maybe if she ever got close, Ernest could just transfigure a Ministry intern into a look-alike of her toad for her to work on; that might be less trouble than explaining himself.

"Alright," he agreed, fishing out the money for the purchase. "Do you need anything else for him, while we're here?" What did toads need to be happy? (Were toads capable of such an emotion?) Owls and cats would need a cage for travel to and from the school, but he had no notion how one was meant to transport a toad, or what they were supposed to eat. A shop clerk might have advised them better, but none seemed to be handy at the moment.