"Look here!" said the curate with sudden warmth. "If you're interested in those sort of things..." The naughty devil who possessed Alf bobbed out and almost undid him. "What!--Proper Prefaces!" he said, and added hastily--"and the things appertaining to em!--religion and that." "That's what I mean," said the curate. "Come round to my rooms on Friday. Some of us meet there once a week. Jolly fellows. Come and smoke a pipe and chat!" The Reverend Spink was deeply tainted with the hearty bon-camarade method which the Bishop of Fulham had recently introduced into the Church to enable it to float on the flowing democratic tide. After that Alf went often. The curate, who had made inquiries, found that Alf had once been, according to report, "a roaring, raving Socialist and atheist!" "Shockin the things he used to say!" his informant told him. The curate, who was all out for sensation, was thrilled. Here was a catch indeed!--If he could but bring it off!--What wouldn't the dear Bishop of Fulham say? His prayers were answered more swiftly than he had anticipated. In a month the Reverend Spink had led his penitent to the baptismal font. Alf, asked if he would like any of his people to be present at the ceremony, had shaken his head. "See where it is, sir, Mother's chapel. She'll never forgive me--not but what I'll put up with that if it's right. And dad's I don't know what. I don't know that he knows himself." The only people Alf invited to attend were Mrs. Trupp and her daughter. They refused politely. As Bess said to her mother with the firmness of youth, "We are on Ernie's side. Dad may forget, but we don't." A few weeks later the Reverend Spink went to call on Alf's father. After he had left, Mrs. Caspar heard strange sounds in the study. She went to the door and listened. Then she opened and peeped in. Edward Caspar was laughing as she had never seen him laugh in twenty odd years of married life. The tears were streaming down his face, his head was thrown back and his body convulsed. His wife regarded him with dour sympathy. "What is it?" she asked hardly. Her husband wiped his eyes shamefacedly. "Nothing," he said. "Only the curate's been converting me." That evening, as he went to bed, he peered over the banisters, and said in his grave way to Alf in the kitchen, "I hope your friend Mr. Spink'll come again." Alf reported the incident next day to the curate, adding, "I will say this for dad. He is broad." Mr. Trupp heard of his chauffeur's conversion. "You're church then now, Alf," he said. "Yes, sir," replied the other with the curious naïveté of blunted susceptibilities. "More classier. See, I'm getting on now." And Alf did not stop at baptism. He was thorough in religious as in secular affairs. Next spring, after a careful preparation by the Reverend Spink, he was confirmed by the Bishop and afterwards admitted a member of the C.E.M.S.