"Yeah, I know. Something came up," he said, a little evasively. Obviously he wasn't planning to tell Noble about anything that had happened yesterday, both because he'd promised Cash he wouldn't tell people and because he didn't want Noble to think this was the sort of thing Ford regularly did with his free time, wandering off to handle dangerous magical entities and possible mental breaks as favors for old schoolmates. Noble would probably have said that Ford didn't have any business getting involved in something like that, and that he was in over his head — and he would have been right, on both counts. Ford really ought to have handed this off to someone with more experience with dementors (at the very least someone who had cast a patronus sometime prior to yesterday evening), but he hadn't, and now this was his — he owned it and he wasn't going to let go of it, no matter how stupid it was that he'd started down this path to begin with. It was a little like Noble testing potions on himself, although all of the particulars were different. Which brought him back to what he had intended to talk about in this conversation, the reason he'd woken Noble up before the sun rose.

"But I wanted to say you were right," he announced, realizing only as he said it that he'd given exactly no context for the statement and that Noble was unlikely to be following his particular train of thought. After half a second he added hurriedly, "When we were talking last month. After Lestrange came to dinner."