Your Father must have been a very great Genius. How else could he have invented any happy thing in the black-oak library? The black-oak library was a cross-looking room, dingy, lowering, and altogether boggy. You could not stamp your boot across the threshold without joggling the heart-beats out of the gaunt old clock that loomed in the darkermost corner of the alcove. You could not tiptoe to the candy box without plunging headlong into a stratum of creakiness that puckered your spine as though an electric devil were pulling the very last basting thread out of your little soul. Oh, it must have been a very, very aged room. The darkness was abhorrent to you. The dampness reeked with the stale, sad breath of ancient storms. Worst of all, blood-red curtains clotted at the windows; rusty swords and daggers hung most imminently from the walls, and along the smutted hearth a huge, moth-eaten tiger skin humped up its head in really terrible ferocity. Through all the room there was no lively spot except the fireplace itself. Usually, white birch logs flamed on the hearth with pleasant, crackling cheerfulness, but on this special day you noted with alarm that between the gleaming andirons a soft, red-leather book writhed and bubbled with little gray wisps of pain, while out of a charry, smoochy mass of nothingness a blue-flowered muslin sleeve stretched pleadingly toward you for an instant, shuddered, blazed, and was--gone. It was there that your Father caught you, with that funny, strange sniff of havoc in your nostrils. It was there that your Father told you his news. When you are only a little, little boy and your Father snatches you suddenly up in his arms and tells you that he is going to be married again, it is very astonishing. You had always supposed that your Father was perfectly married! In the dazzling sunshine of the village church was there not a thrilly blue window that said quite distinctly, "Clarice Val Dere" (that was your Mother) "Lived" (_Lived_, it said!) "June, 1860--December, 1880"? All the other windows said "Died" on them. Why should your Father marry again? In your Dear Father's arms you gasped, "Going to be _married_?" and your two eyes must have popped right out of your head, for your Father stooped down very suddenly and kissed them hard--whack, whack, back into place. "N--o, not going to be married," he corrected, "but going to be married--again." He spoke as though there were a great difference; but it was man-talk and you did not understand it. Then he gathered you into the big, dark chair and pushed you way out on his knees and scrunched your cheeks in his hands and ate your face all up with his big eyes. When he spoke at last, his voice was way down deep like a bass drum. "Little Boy Jack," he said, "you must never, never, never forget your Dear Mother!" His words and the bir-r-r of them shook you like a leaf. "But what was my Dear Mother like?" you whimpered. You had never seen your Mother.