Patching together a miniature curriculum for an of-age witch with rather specific needs had proved less onerous than Severus had suspected it would, and the added mystery of exactly who had been sending Professor Burbage those (rather ill-composed, uncreative, dully belligerent) owls had made this entire affair worth the minimal trouble it had caused him. He wasn't even really dreading giving lessons, knowing as he did that there was no chance of back-talk, loss of focus or the general miasma of surliness that seemed to fill this room when the chairs were full of proper students. He'd cleared the usual dueling area for practice, and was biding his time until she arrived by flipping through the latest stack of materials from which he was still determined to make his own text. He still had ... five weeks to pull it off.
But he might actually manage it, the way things were going now. The Muggle Studies professor had had a more exciting summer than he had - even he'd never received any credible death threats, which hardly seemed fair. It would have spiced things up.