Presently they turned a corner and came upon a joyful crowd of boys. They ran, they yelled, they flung, and in their midst cursed and floundered a rusty rag of a woman, drunk and infuriate, harried, battered and bedeviled. Her clothes were of decent black, but dusty and neglected, and one side of her skirt dripped with fresh mud. Her hair was draggled about her shoulders, and her bonnet hung in it, a bunch of mangled crape, while she staggered hither and thither, making futile swipes at the nimble rascals about her. She struck out feebly with a little parcel of bacon-rashers rolled in a paper, and already a rasher had escaped, to be flung at her head, and flung again by the hand that could first snatch it from the gutter. “Yah! Old Mother Born-drunk!” shouted the young savages, and two swooped again with the stretched skipping-rope that had already tripped their victim twice. But she clasped a post with both arms, and cursed at large, hoarse and impotent. Nan May started and stood, and then hurried on. For she had recognised a face at last, grimed and bloated though it had grown. “Law!” she said, “it’s Emma Pacey! To think—to think of it!” Indeed the shock was great, and the change amazing. It was a change that would have baffled recognition by an eye that had less closely noted the Emma Pacey of seventeen years ago. But Emma Pacey was a smart girl then (though fast and forward, Nan May had always said), and had caused some little disturbance in a course of true love which led, nevertheless, to Nan’s wedding after all. In such circumstances a woman views her rival’s face, as she views her clothes, with a searching eye, and remembers well. “And to come to that!” mused Nan May, perplexed at a shade of emotion that seemed ill-turned to the occasion, wherein the simple soul saw nothing of womanish triumph. But the changes seemed not all for the worse. There were busy factories, and some that had been small were now large. Coffee-stalls, too, were set up in two or three places, where no such accommodation was in the old time: always a sign of increasing trade. But on the whole the walk did nothing to raise Nan’s spirits. Johnny saw little. The excursion was to decide whether he should learn to make steam-engines or not, though what manner of adventure he was to encounter he figured but vaguely. He was to come into presence of some gentlemen, presumably—gentlemen who would settle his whole destiny off-hand, on a cursory examination of his appearance and manner. He must be alert to show his best behaviour, though what things the gentlemen might do or say, and what unforeseen problems of conduct might present themselves, were past guessing; though he guessed and guessed, oblivious of present circumstance. Only once before had he felt quite that quality of trepidation, and that was three years back, when he trudged along the road to Woodford to get a tooth drawn.