A knife ran into Nathan’s heart. Where was Carol this moment and what was she doing? The paper must have been mailed a week before—she had been several days on her honeymoon already.... Carol had wanted him to get the Harvey house in Pearl Street.... Milly’s hand was very sweaty and hard, calloused from the pasting of many boxes.... Where had old Ezra got so many cobwebs on his hat?... Where would he take Milly that first night?... Where was Carol and what—— “Yes! I mean ‘I do!’” he answered anent keeping, loving and cherishing this female in sickness and in health and all the rest of it, whatever it was. He was dimly conscious that he was trying to get the ring on Milly’s finger; it didn’t fit half so well as it had in the jewelry store. Ezra was grinning—showing ivories like an enameled picket-fence—it was fourteen minutes after nine o’clock—Carol had said she wanted the living room furnished in Mission—— “... I now therefore pronounce you man and wife and may God bless your union, Amen! And it’ll cost you five bucks.” Nathan and Milly came down into Main Street. It looked quite like Main Street on a hundred other Saturday nights. “Where’ll we go?” asked Milly, as they paused on the top step in front of the Norwalk Block so as not to be jostled by the grocery-bill-paying, Sunday-meat-buying crowd. She clung to Nathan’s arm with one hand and in the other held her marriage certificate as though she didn’t know what to do with it. Which she didn’t. “I dunno!” said Nathan vaguely. “What do you want to do?” “I want to go home and tell Ma and the kids,” returned Milly honestly. “To think when I left the house to-night, I was coming back _married_! My Gawd!” They descended the four stone steps and were obliterated at once in the serpentine sidewalk traffic of hopeless mediocrity. BOOK TWO SUNSHINE GLORIOUS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER I TOO EASY MONEY I Regardless of the chagrin the reminder often cost its womenfolk, the foundation for the Ruggles family “Money” had been laid in the junk business. Junk. Exactly. Junk! Jasper Ruggles, the grandfather, had started life as one of those peddlers who drove about New England in a cart resembling a small-sized circus wagon of flaming scarlet. He swapped tinware with farmers’ wives for rags and old metal and never got cheated. From gathering old metal was but a step to melting it. From melting was but another step to finding a manufactured product. So an iron works had flourished following the Civil War and canny investments had done the rest.