The Coming of Bill

of clothes. I've a position to keep up now, Mr. Winfield.'

Kirk lit a fresh cigar and sat thinking. The old feeling of desolation

which had attacked him as he came up the bay had returned. He felt like

a stranger in a strange world. Life was not the same. Ruth was not the

same. Nothing was the same.

The more he contemplated the new regulations affecting Bill the

chillier and more unfriendly did they seem to him. He could not bring

himself to realize Ruth as one of the great army of cranks preaching

and carrying out the gospel of Lora Delane Porter. It seemed so at

variance with her character as he had known it. He could not seriously

bring himself to believe that she genuinely approved of these absurd

restrictions. Yet, apparently she did.

He looked into the future. It had a grey and bleak aspect. He seemed to

himself like a man gazing down an unknown path full of unknown perils.

Chapter III The Misadventure of Steve

Kirk was not the only person whom the sudden change in the financial

position of the Winfield family had hit hard. The blighting effects of

sudden wealth had touched Steve while Kirk was still in Colombia.

In a sense, it had wrecked Steve's world. Nobody had told him to stop

or even diminish the number of his visits, but the fact remained that,

by the time Kirk returned to New York, he had practically ceased to go

to the house on Fifth Avenue.

For all his roughness, Steve possessed a delicacy which sometimes

almost amounted to diffidence; and he did not need to be told that

there was a substantial difference, as far as he was concerned, between

the new headquarters of the family and the old. At the studio he had

been accustomed to walk in when it pleased him, sure of a welcome; but

he had an idea that he did not fit as neatly into the atmosphere of

Fifth Avenue as he had done into that of Sixty-First Street; and nobody

disabused him of it.

It was perhaps the presence of Mrs. Porter that really made the

difference. In spite of the compliments she had sometimes paid to his

common sense, Mrs. Porter did not put Steve at his ease. He was almost

afraid of her. Consequently, when he came to Fifth Avenue, he remained

below stairs, talking pugilism with Keggs.

It was from Keggs that he first learned of the changes that had taken

place in the surroundings of William Bannister.

'I've 'ad the privilege of serving in some of the best houses in

England,' said the butler one evening, as they sat smoking in the

pantry, 'and I've never seen such goings on. I don't hold with the

pampering of children.'

'What do you mean, pampering?' asked Steve.

'Well, Lord love a duck!' replied the butler, who in his moments of

relaxation was addicted to homely expletives of the lower London type.

'If you don't call it pampering, what do you call pampering? He ain't

allowed to touch nothing that ain't been, it's slipped my memory what

they call it, but it's got something to do with microbes. They sprinkle

stuff on his toys and on his clothes and on his nurse; what's more, and

on any one who comes to see him. And his nursery ain't what I

call a nursery at all. It's nothing more or less than a private