She must have recognized the reference, because she smiled. When he had been a boy at Hogwarts, surrounded by other boys his age and yet simultaneously newly alone in the world, an older student had broken a crystal ball in the common room and he'd secreted away one smooth piece that caught his eye as it caught the firelight. He'd rested it in the windowsill of his tower bedroom, and sometimes in the morning — not every day, not always at the same time — the sunlight striking it would send golden lights dancing across the ceiling of the dorm room. Her smile was like that — as dazzling, as fleeting. She pursed her lips, and though he could see the traces of the expression around the edges of her face still she seemed determined not to let it out again. How much time had he spent after those brief flashes of light nudging the shard of crystal along the windowsill, trying to find just the right position or angle to make it happen again? You could just use a spell, one of his roommates had said, but Ned somehow knew instinctively that using magic to achieve the same result would have taken all of the magic out of it. It was beautiful because it was unexpected; because it was a thing that had to be coaxed into existence rather than commanded.

He was going to get her to smile at him again, he determined. Given that he'd already been in the process of leaving when they'd met, this might prove difficult. His mother was waving the servants away and turning in this direction already. He was momentarily taken aback when she presented him with the book, so lost his opportunity to remark on it before his mother joined them — and now it wouldn't do to make a joke about how good it was that the shoes were not actually made of glass, given how hastily she'd thrown them down to the ground.

"Perhaps next time we take the floo, Mama," he suggested to her, though he knew she would still insist on taking a carriage anywhere that was reasonably within a carriage-ride from London. What's the point of having a carriage at all if no one sees us using it? she had already told him once before. "It's far less likely that a servant might accidentally send any lost young women to our address. Though I suppose not impossible," he mused. "And more embarrassing for our poor heroine in that case, I suspect. No — perhaps we were right to take the carriage after all."

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