Soon after eight that evening I knocked at Mrs Walker's door, and was ushered by her daughter into the small, clean, but rather shabbily-furnished best room. It smelt strongly of the geraniums, which grew high in a row before the window, and as I entered Jack Yelverton rose and greeted me cheerily, giving me his easy chair, taking down a box of cigars from the shelf, and producing a surreptitious bottle of whiskey, a syphon, and a couple of glasses from a little cupboard in the wall. "I'm jolly glad you've come," he said, when he had reseated himself, and I had got my weed under way. "The surprise to-day has indeed been a pleasant one. Lots of times I have thought of you, and wondered where and how you were. But in the world men drift apart, and even the best resolutions of correspondence made at college are mostly broken. However, it is a very pleasant meeting this, for I feel already that I'm among friends." "Of course you are, old chap," I answered. "My people will always be pleased to see you. Like yourself, I'm awfully glad we've met. But you're the very last man I should have imagined would have gone in for the Church. It isn't your first appointment, I suppose?" "No," he answered reflectively, gazing at the end of his cigar. "It came about in this way. I studied for a couple of years at Lincoln's Inn, but somehow I didn't care much for the law, and one day it occurred to me that with my knowledge of theology I might have a chance of doing good among my fellow-men. I don't know what put it into my head, I'm sure, but straight away I saw my uncle the Bishop, and the result was that very soon afterwards I was appointed curate at Framlingham, in Suffolk. This disappointed me. I felt that I ought to work in one of the overcrowded cities; that I might, with the income my father had left me, alleviate the sufferings of some of the deserving poor; that I might be the means of effecting some good in the world. At last I was successful in obtaining an appointment under the Vicar of Christ Church, Commercial Street, Spitalfields, where I can tell you I had plenty of opportunity for doing that which I had set my mind upon. A curate's life in the East End isn't very pleasant if he does his duty, and mine was not a very salubrious locality. The air of the slums is poisonous. For three years I worked there," he went on after a slight pause. "Then I exchanged to St Peter's, Walworth, and then, owing to ill-health, I was compelled to come here, into the country again. That's briefly been my life since we parted." "Well," I said, convinced of his earnestness of purpose in the life he had adopted, for a man does not seek an appointment in a London slum unless he feels a strong incentive to work in the interests of his fellow-men, "you'll get all right very soon here, I hope. The air is fresh, your parish isn't very large, and old Layton, the rector, is an easy-going old chap--one of the old school."