This December morning, however, as the great man, proceeding majestically on foot from the Duke of Wellington, turned up the narrow street with its worn cobblestones and its double row of mean little houses, he fully intended as far as might be humanly possible "to right things with Melia once for all."
The Mayor entered the shop and found his eldest daughter serving a woman in a white apron and a black and white checked shawl over her head with two pennyworth of carrots and a stick of celery. The honest dame was so taken aback by the arrival of the Mayor of the city, who was personally known to every man, woman and child throughout the district as one of a great triumvirate, of whom the King and the Prime Minister were the other two, that she fled in hot haste without paying for the spoils she bore away in her apron.
Melia, however, true to the stock whence she sprang, had no false delicacy in the matter. Without taking the slightest notice of the august visitor, she was the other side the counter in a jiffy, out of the shop and calling after the fleeing customer, "You haven't paid your fivepence, Mrs. Odell."
The Mayor stood at the shop door, watching with a kind of grim enjoyment the process of the fivepence being extracted. He plainly approved it. Melia, with all her limitations, had the root of the matter in her. Upon her return, a little flushed and rather breathless, he refrained from paying her the compliment he felt she deserved but was content to ask if trade was brisk.
Trade was brisker, said Melia, than she had ever known it.
Josiah was glad of that. He then looked round to assure himself that they were alone in the shop and being convinced that such was the case, he stood a moment awkwardly silent, balancing himself like a stork first on one leg and then on the other.
"Gel," he took her hand suddenly, "you are back in my will. Sally's back too. You are both going to have an equal share with Ethel." He felt the roughened, toil-stained hand begin to quiver a little in his strong grasp. "Bygones have got to be bygones. Understand me." He drew her towards him and kissed her stoutly and firmly in the middle of the forehead.
He retained his hold while her hot tears dripped on to his hand. She stood tense and rigid, unable to speak or move. But she knew as she stood there that it was no use fighting him or fighting herself. His masterfulness, his simplicity, his courage had reawakened her earliest and deepest instinct, the love and admiration she had once had for him. Of a sudden she began to sob pitifully. With a queer look on his face he took out a large red handkerchief and put his arms round her and wiped her eyes slowly and with a gentleness hard to credit in him, just as he had done when as a very little girl she had fallen and hurt herself on the tiled yard of the Duke of Wellington.