“Well, well, well,” he said, holding out a hand which Jerry accepted in the same amicable spirit in which it was offered, “so you’re the son of Robert Bowe!  We were good friends before you were stolen and I hope will be again when you get reacquainted with me.  Maybe your father and mother will be satisfied to stay with the circus now that you have been found.”

“Was they goin’ to leave the circus?” asked Danny in an awed voice.

“So they said,” answered Mr. Burrows, “but now I guess they’ll stay.”

“Go away an’ not be a clown no more?” Jerry asked this new-old friend, as one man to another.

“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.

“What is it, Jerry?” asked Mrs. Bowe.  “Tell mother.”

Jerry tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t hurt his father’s feelings or his mother’s, but couldn’t, and he stood there in misery and disappointment, his lips quivering and twisting and the tears gathering on his eyelashes.

It was Danny who voiced the emotions that Jerry was experiencing.

“You look different,” he said.  “Only your voice sounds the same.”

“Bless my soul!” cried Mr. Burrows, and laughed heartily.  “The boy’s disappointed that his father’s just a man and not a clown.”

“Is that it, Jerry?” asked his mother, falling to her knees and gathering him close to her breast.

“He ain’t Whiteface,” Jerry mourned softly in her ear.

Mr. Bowe laughed at that, and it was such a good-humored, infectious chuckle of mirth that Jerry at last looked up at his very disappointing father, and the twinkle in his father’s eyes and the engaging, twisty smile that played about his lips comforted Jerry.  This father of his wasn’t so ordinary looking, after all!  But a clown is so much more interesting than just an everyday father.