"Now, some of you may not know the story about her . . . " There were several questioning sounds and the group fell silent. "This is what happened. About seventy years ago, there was a knock at the door of the church. 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.