rch. It was a wild rainy morning, and the Father asked one of the
nuns to see who it was. She opened the door. No one was there--only a
basket. She brought the basket in out of the rain and said 'it's a
baby, Father! All wrapped in a sheet.'

"The Father thought. 'We must take care of it,' he said. 'Is it--a boy
or a girl?'

"The nun bent over, unwrapped the baby, and said, 'A girl, Father,
bless her.'

"'She must have a name,' Father said. 'She is a child of God. That we
know. Agnes will be her name.' He looked at the window and said, 'It's
not much of a day out. We will call her, Agnes Grayborn.' So the nuns
took her and raised her, and Agnes has worked all her life for the
church.

"And now, boys, we've had to sell the building where Agnes lives. She
has no place to go." Voices raised and mumbled. A hand came up, halfway
down the group.

"I gotta small place in one of mine. I'll take care of it. Least we can
do."

"Thanks, Tony."

"Yes!" Clapping.

"Agnes!" Glasses were held up.

Well, all right! Joe thought. He left and walked toward the Holiday
Inn. Every once in a while, things work out the way they should. He
felt his resolve to keep going. It was in him like a fist. "I, too, am
a hard man," he said.

16

Sunny Honolulu . . . Joe was relieved to be back. He wrote to Kate,
enclosing her inheritance check and explaining his father's stipulation
concerning the money. "No problem," she e-mailed back, "we're out every
weekend looking at houses." Joe paid his Montpelier tuition and put
some money in the bank, but he couldn't resist buying 4000 shares of a
company that he'd been following on the Internet.

An Italian, whose father was well-known in the steel business, had
developed a new type of composite steel. Stainless steel tubes were
packed with crushed recycled carbon steel and then rolled under heat
and pressure, bonding the whole together. The resulting composite, or
cladded, steel had the outer resistance of stainless but was much
cheaper. There was a huge market for non-corroding rebar to be used in
concrete exposed to the weather, particularly in marine environments
and in roads that were salted during the winter.

The Italian joined forces with a British financier who had a good
reputation. They entered a joint venture with a Korean firm that
subsequently withdrew support for reasons that had nothing to do with
the quality of the product. Their venture went bankrupt, but the two
h