‘Well, Molly, I'm pretty sure this is a boggart,’

‘Well, Molly, I'm pretty sure this is a boggart,’ said Sirius, peering through the keyhole, ‘but perhaps we ought to let Mad-Eye have a shifty at it before we let it out—knowing my mother, it could be something much worse.’

‘Right you are, Sirius,’ said Mrs. Weasley.

They were both speaking in carefully light, polite voices that told Harry quite plainly that neither had forgotten their disagreement of the night before.

A loud, clanging bell sounded from downstairs, followed at once by the cacophony of screams and wails that had been triggered the previous night by Tonks knocking over the umbrella stand.

‘I keep telling them not to ring the doorbell!’ said Sirius exasperatedly, hurrying out of the room. They heard him thundering clown the stairs as Mrs. Black's screeches echoed up through the house once more: ‘Stains of dishonour, filthy half-breeds, blood traitors, children of flith...’

‘Close the door, please, Harry,’ said Mrs. Weasley.

Harry took as much time as he dared to close the drawing-room door; he wanted to listen to what was going on downstairs. Sirius had obviously managed to shut the curtains over his mothers portrait because she had stopped screaming. He heard Sirius walking down the hall, then the clattering of the chain on the front door, and then a deep voice he recognised as Kingsley Shacklebolt's saying, ‘Hestia's just relieved me, so she's got Moody's Cloak now, thought I'd leave a report for Dumbledore....’

Feeling Mrs Weasley's eyes on the back of his head, Harry regretfully closed the drawing-room door and rejoined the doxy party.

Mrs. Weasley was bending over to check the page on doxys in Gilderoy Lockhart's Guide to Household Pests, which was lying open on the sofa.

‘Right, you lot, you need to be careful, because doxys bite and their teeth are poisonous. I've got a bottle of antidote here, but I'd rather nobody needed it.’

She straightened up, positioned herself squarely in front of the curtains and beckoned them all forward.

‘When I say the word, start spraying immediately,’ she said. ‘They'll come flying out at us, I expect, but it says on the sprays one good squirt will paralyse them. When they're immobilized, just throw them in this bucket.’

She stepped carefully out of their line of fire, and raised her own spray.

‘All right—squirt!’

Harry had been spraying only a few seconds when a fully-grown doxy came soaring out of a fold in the material, shiny beetle-like wings whirring, tiny needle-sharp teeth bared, its fairy-like body covered with thick black hair and its four tiny fists clenched with fury. Harry caught it full in the face with a blast of Doxycide; it froze in midair and fell, with a surprisingly loud thunk, on to the worn carpet below. Harry picked it up and threw it in the bucket.

‘Fred, what are you doing?’ said Mrs. Weasley sharply. ‘Spray that at once and throw it away!’

Harry looked round. Fred was holding a struggling doxy between his forefinger and thumb.

‘Right-o,’ Fred said brightly, spraying the doxy quickly in the face so that it fainted, but the moment Mrs. Weasley's back was turned he pocketed it with a wink.

‘We want to experiment with doxy venom for our Skiving Snackboxes,’ George told Harry under his breath.

Deftly spraying two doxys at once as they soared straight for his nose, Harry moved closer to George and muttered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘What are Skiving Snackboxes?’