His wife's appeal reached his ears but did not go much deeper. He answered it first with a weary sigh, then responded in a plodding tone, "None of the children are quite stupid enough to believe something without evidence indefinitely. They will doubtless become convinced that I am not on death's door when I fail to die in a timely fashion."

As far as what Annabelle thought, he wasn't sure he should even bother to answer. His opinion of his wife's sister, first as a woman who worked and second as a woman who worked as a healer specifically, was not incredibly high — but for the sake of his wife he had always refrained from voicing anything of the sort (just as he refrained from making any comment at all on whatever it was Marcella Weasley was doing with her life), and he was hardly looking to start a petty fight with her now, when he was in the middle of investigating what he considered a matter of life and death — or life and life-as-a-cripple, which was much the same.