"Not your fault," he offered and briefly looked up from his notebook. The openness of her smile caught him by surprise, and he lingered on it for a second. Not many people showed this sort of sentiment towards him, the one he read in her expression. He frowned, suspicious about it. He was generally regarded as troublesome, and Lyra, friends with Reymund, ought to dislike him as much as his posse did. Much of this tension was about the incident with Gryffindor chaser McMullen in the prior year— McMulen was a fifth year whom Sam had gotten into an ugly fight with about something very silly. That had prevented McMullen from playing in a game, and the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team unfortunately had not forgotten about that during summer break, and Sam had to deal with that open debt. It might, it surely would, come back around to bite him.

He would wait and deal with it quietly, he thought. This year, Samuel had decided to calm down. In a sense, he was giving up. It was going swimmingly; it was really much easier. He closed his notebook and leaned far back in his chair. The seconds stretched. Somehow, her attention was still on him, he could feel that.

He turned in his chair to look towards her. "What?" something in his eyes seemed to ask. Then he laid his head down on his arms on the tabletop. He might as well try to rest for fifteen minutes, until the tutoring Professor would arrive.

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