She was barely visible.
The table was the largest one, slotted between two large, well-stocked shelves of literature about magic. The dark colour of the wood had faded in stripes with the sun's rays, the eight chairs lining each side in the same condition.
Books of all shapes and sizes were piled around her, towering in magically supported heaps, the parchment of most of them yellowed with age. A dusty, leather scent hung in the air, tainted with the barely perceptible smell of ink.
The girl at the wide, oaken table was alone.
Her satchel lay at her feet, her robes hanging over the back of the chair she was seated on. Clad in her school shirt and skirt, her sleeves were rolled up, her face bent over the thick tome she had acquired from the shelves around her.
The afternoon sunlight spread from the wide windows and between the shelves, illuminating the immense volume that was lying before her, her delicate fingers moving on the markings on the page.
Her fingertips were stained with ink from the quill gripped in her other hand, her dark eyes moving down the pages with the swiftness of one familiar with the art of reading and finding the necessary information within a mass of script.
A tall, thin woman was moving around the shelves, replacing returned books without so much as a curious look in the direction of the girl at the table, the bowed, bushy-haired head one far too familiar for her.
The gold-feathered quill in her hand was laid down with a soft click, as she struggled to close the weighty book with an audible thump. Giving the oblivious librarian an apologetic look, she stood up, pushing her hair back from her face.
Hoisting the book off the table, Hermione Granger made her way around to the shelf to replace it and – in the process of it – managed to find three others that looked useful.
Returning to the table, she examined the cover of one of the three: Dark Creatures and their habits. On the front of the nearly-black, wooden cover, there was an unflattering engraving of a werewolf.
Hermione tutted, sitting down and pulling her legs up underneath her. Opening the book, she skimmed through the musty pages. The parchment was so old that she was certain it would crumble at her touch.
With every other book she had read on the subject, werewolves were criticised, despised and feared, but few of the books seemed to notice that the werewolves were – in fact – humans for most of the time.
In fact, only one had noted it, without blaming the afflicted victim.
Retrieving her quill, the young witch looked down at her notes. Her writing was neat and organised, but she was running out of space in her notebook for the notes for the essay Snape had given them in Lupin's absence.
Leaving the latest book in her lap, she reached down and fumbled through her satchel. A line of stitches ran up the seam, where she had been forced to reinforce her repair spell, just in case of emergencies.
Her hand closed over the small, blue diary that contained her timetable and the homework deadlines. Opening it, she flicked through to the dates for the next week and placed it on the table.
With her quill, she scratched in a note, for the Defence Against The Dark Arts class, to ask Professor Lupin about whether the full moon was known to affect any other so-called dark creatures.
Absently, she noticed that they had just passed a full moon, the previous week.
Leaving her diary lying open on the chair next to hers, just in case she thought of anything else to ask, she lifted the Dark Creatures and Their Habits book onto the table, marking the place with her finger and etching a new heading in her notepad.
So far, she had used ten heavy library books in addition to the compulsary ones, each of them filling at least a page with notes.
Flicking carefully to the chapter about werewolves, touching the fragile pages as much as she dared, she opened onto a page with a painted picture of a man halfway through his change into the wolf.
He was hunched over his bent legs with hair sprouting on his bare shoulders and arched back. The expression on his contorted face suggested that he was in a great deal of pain, his hands looking like they had been stretched.
The thing that caught her attention, though, was the round disc that represented the full moon in the dark sky of the picture, surrounded by a hazy mist of wispy cloud.
A white disc...like a white orb...
Hermione gasped.
Snatching her diary, she flicked back to the previous week, checking the nights that the full moon had appeared, then comparing them with the dates that Lupin had apparently been ill.
"No..." She muttered, staring down at the book, then at her notes.
Surely it wasn't possible that...
Kneeling on her chair, using one hand to keep her unruly hair back from her face, she leaned over her notes, one forefinger running down the words, skimming through them with increasing agitation.
It all made sense, she finally had to admit, down on her heels.
Her robe had fallen off the back of her chair, taking several smaller volumes with it, but she didn't even notice.
Why he had seen an orb when they faced the boggart. Why he looked ill so regularly. Why Snape had given them this particular essay to do in Professor Lupin's absence.
Diping her quill in the ink and opened her notebook on a blank sheet, to write one line, to convince herself she wasn't just dreaming it.
'Professor Lupin is a werewolf.'
Then, she tore the page from her notebook and crushed it into a ball.
He wanted to keep it a secret. She didn't blame him.
If he could, then she could too.