The woman straightening the parlor was at an indeterminate age... young enough to still be considered young by the old, but old enough that the young considered her old. As she worked, she talked to the cat curled up on the hearthrug.

"Another Valentine's day," she was saying, "and a Hogsmeade visiting day for the students. Oh, things are sure to be busy at Madame Puddifoot's today!"

The cat yawned. She was an old cat, and some of her teeth were gone, but it was still a yawn to make a rodent nervously edge back into a hole. She put her chin back on her paws, and the square black markings around her eyes, which looked like spectacles, caught the light. Madame Puddifoot, the cat thought. That absurd tea room. This would be... what? The third owner since Puddifoot herself had owned it? Fourth, perhaps.

She could remember going there with Ancelm, in her own seventh year as a student. How awkward they had been, neither of them quite sure how to act, what to do. It was a different time... now, she'd heard, the students sometimes had to be separated before things could proceed too far for public decency; then... a touch of hands, a lingering gaze... these things had been enough to stir the blood of a young girl.

It had been their last Valentine's day as a couple, Minerva recalled. Three months later, they'd finished their NEWTs... Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests... and had parted, as they said, "just for the summer." But Professor Dumbledore had written her a letter to Balcoin College in Paris, and she'd had to go and talk to them, just to be polite, really, and before she knew it, there were classes and late-night discussions of transfiguration with other thaumaturgy students, and...

And it was Valentine's day before she knew it. She prepared a surprise; took the train to London to see him, bought tickets to see the Wimbourne Wasps, his favorite Quiddich team, playing against the Appleby Arrows. When she arrived in London, it was raining. She caught a cab to his flat, but in the end, she was the one surprised... surprised by the girl opening the door, surprised by the pet name the girl called him, surprised that he hadn't waited for her.

She'd sat in the rain that afternoon, watching the Quiddich game by herself, not even bothering with a bumbershoot charm. Gridpipe was aging, but still a powerful player. He'd won the game by catching the snitch when the Arrows were up by 130, and the Wasp fans went home cheered.

As she rode the train back towards France, McGonagall thought that she might catch pneumonia, wither and die, and then he'd be sorry. She hadn't, though. She'd gone back to classes, gone back a little quieter, perhaps, but no one noticed.

She heard later that Ancelm married the girl. They'd been among the first to vanish, during Voldemort's rise to power.