"Go away and not be a clown any more," Mr. Burrows asserted.
Just then a man and woman entered and came straight to Jerry. Why, it was Jerry's mother and a strange man!
Mrs. Bowe didn't look the same in an ordinary blue dress and without the paint on her cheeks and lips and yet Jerry had recognized her almost at once; perhaps it was her golden-brown hair, or, more likely, the joy which sparkled in her eyes and lighted up her face.
"I didn't go away once, Mother," he said.
She smiled at him and the strange man spoke.
"I knew you wouldn't," he said.
Jerry was dumfounded and so must Danny and Chris have been, for they gasped. The voice that issued from the lips of the strange man was the voice of Whiteface, the clown, the new-found father of Jerry!
Jerry's thoughts were paralyzed for a minute and he could only stare up at Robert Bowe, ordinary citizen, in stupefaction.
So that was what his father looked like when he didn't have the clown costume on, with his face all chalked and his lips rouged! Just a common, ordinary, everyday, plain man, like—like Dan Mullarkey was, or Tom Phillips or Darn Darner's father. He was not very tall and not very big, and his face was rather long and there was quite a sprinkling of gray in his hair.
Jerry was so terribly disappointed in his father that, after that long stare, he gazed away and would not look up at him again. He winked his eyes to keep the tears from coming.