XIII. WHEN Nan May opened shop, she saw that men were pulling down as much of the ship-yard wall opposite as stood between two chalk lines. She thought no more of the thing at the time, not guessing how nearly it concerned her. For this was to be a new workmen’s gate to the ship-yard and passing workmen might change the fortunes of a shop. For that day, however, there was no sign but the demand of a bricklayer’s labourer for a penn’orth of cheese. It was as bad a day as Saturday, in the matter of trade—indeed there was no drunken man to buy lard—and the woman’s heart grew heavier as the empty hours went. Bessy stood at the back-parlour door, pale and anxious, but striving to lift a brave face. Before one o’clock there was dinner to be prepared; not that either Bessy or her mother could eat, but for Johnny. And at a quarter past one both met him at the door as cheerfully as they could; and indeed they were eager to hear of his fortunes. They wondered to see him coming with the long man who lived next door; and the long man, for his part, was awkward and nervous when he saw them. At first he hung back, as though to let Johnny go on alone; but he changed his mind, and came striding ahead hastily, looking neither to right nor to left, and plunged in at his door. Johnny was hungry and in high spirits. He and Long Hicks, it seemed, had been bedding down a junk ring for a piston, Johnny easing the bolts and nuts, and Long Hicks doing the other work. He said nothing of the round square, but talked greatly of slide-valves and cranks, till Bessy judged him a full engineer already. Between his mouthfuls he illustrated the proper handling of hammer and file, and reprehended the sinful waste of spoiling the surface of a new file on the outer skin of a fresh iron casting. It cheered Nan May to see the boy taking so heartily to his work, through all her secret dread that she might lack the means to keep him at it. Johnny glanced anxiously at the clock from time to time, and at last declared that he must knock for Long Hicks, who was plainly forgetting how late it was. And in the end he rushed away to disturb the tall man ten minutes too soon, and hurried off to Maidment and Hurst’s, there to take his own new metal ticket from the great board, and drop it duly into the box.