Augusta Longbottom found him near the door as the evening was drawing in.
She had the quality she had carried all evening — upright, formal, not performing warmth but not withholding it either. Up close she had the bearing of someone who had been through a great deal and had come through it with her standards intact, which was its own kind of strength.
'The Gillyweed,' she said. Not as a question.
'Yes,' he said.
'Hebridean stock,' she said. 'Neville told me. That is not easily sourced.'
'No,' he said. 'It takes some planning.'
She looked at him with the assessing quality she had used at the beginning of the evening, and which she had not put down. 'You think Herbology is serious,' she said.
'I think Neville's Herbology is serious,' he said. 'Which is not the same thing as thinking all Herbology is serious. Neville has a quality in that subject that I've seen matched by very few people in any subject.'
Augusta Longbottom was quiet for a moment. It was not a silence of disagreement. It was the silence of someone holding a thing carefully.
'He has always been better than he believed himself to be,' she said, with a quality that was not an apology and not quite not one. 'I have not always made that easy for him to see.'
This was not what he had expected. He received it without comment, because it deserved to be received rather than responded to.
She looked across the room to where Neville was in conversation with Lupin and his mother, gesturing at something with the specific ease of someone who had forgotten to be careful about being seen.
'He is happy,' she said, with the quality of someone encountering evidence of something they had worked toward and hoped for and were still surprised to find.
'Yes,' Ron said. 'He is.'
She looked at Ron for one more moment. 'You are good for him,' she said, with the tone of a woman who chose her words with precision and meant every one. 'I am glad he has you.'
She moved away toward Neville before he had found an answer, which he thought she had probably intended.