Picture Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

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At her daughter's utterance of the :ame suspicion that had crossed her own nind as to the reason for her husband's lesertion of them on the bench while hey had been asleep, the woman's lips ightened. ' "That is a good idea," she nodded grimly, "and it's what we'll do." She smiled cordially at Charlie. "Won't you come home with us?" she isked him. Charlie looked at her daughter — she »vas even prettier than the girl on the Dther bench had been, he told himself. "Oh — why, certainly, certainly !" he :urned to answer the older woman, with another tip of his hat at her. The girl rose and took Charlie's arm on one side Her mother slipped her arm through his on the other. And off they set. Five minutes later, Charlie found himself in a brownstone residence, in a fashionable side street near one of the entrances to the park, and not a little awed by the richness of his surroundings. The cross-eyed man, who had provided this home for his wife and daughter, must have prospered exceedingly in whatever business was his. "Make yourself right at home!" his | wife told Charlie Chaplin, as she and her daughter removed their hats. That reminded Charlie to take off his own, which he had not yet done. He was embarrassed as a boy paying his first visit to a dancing class, in the unexpectedly sumptuous interior of that house. In his confusion, he sat down on top of the girl's hat, which she had dropped in one of the drawing-room chairs. Charlie got up again — swiftly. The hat was clinging to the seat of his trousers by the hatpins which he had encountered upon accepting his hostess' invitation to sit down — without looking first to see where he sat. Charlie reached around behind him, with a martyr's smile at the pretty girl who had remained in the room with him while her mother was occupied in the next — which, from the clink of chinaware and silver that floated from it, appeared to be the dining room — and removed the hat. "What's the matter?" asked the girl. "Wasn't that chair comfortable? Try this one." Charlie crossed the room, with a deprecatory smile and a shrug of his shoulders, to the chair she indicated, and seated himself in it. An expression of PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY intense suffering instantly contorted his face. He rose again — having sat down on her mother's hat, this time. There were a number of feathers in it, and, with the hat sticking by the hatpins to the seat of his trousers, and the feathers pluming out under his short coat, Charlie looked like a rooster. He tried to pulled the hatpins out, and failed. "Here, let me help you !" offered the girl, aware of his plight. She took hold of the hat and pulled. Charlie went up on his toes. He pressed his hand to his cheek. Then he inserted the fingers of it in his mouth, and bit on them while the girl continued to pull at the pins that the force with which he had sat down in the chair had driven into him up to the hilt, so to speak. The hat came away, and Charlie sank back on his heels once more. He wiped the cold perspiration from his brow. "I liked your mother's hat the minute I saw it," he informed the girl, with a wan attempt at a smile ; "but I didn't think I'd get so stuck on it that I'd try to take it away with me — like this !" Her mother appeared at that moment in the doorway of the next room. "Won't you come and have something to eat?" she invited Charlie. Charlie's little black mustache took a doleful slant above his mouth, which drooped open. He stood up on his tiptoes, and craned his neck to look by the wife of the cross-eyed man into the dining room behind her. At sight of the table, all set there, and the food upon it, Charlie's woebegone expression deepened. "Well, I lose !" he said. Mother and daughter looked blankly at each other and then at him. "Lose what?" asked the girl. "The bet that I made with myself that I wouldn't get anything to eat before to-morrow," Charlie answered, with a sorrowful shake of his head. "I hate to lose it, too. For that makes two dollars more I'll have to add to what I already owe myself. I'm afraid to look at myself in the glass when I'm shaving any more, for fear I will threaten to sue me for not paying my debts." Laughingly the girl and her mother escorted Charlie to the table and seated him there between them. There was a plate of doughnuts before Charlie. "The ship's going down," said Charlie gayly to the cross-eyed man's wife. "Will you have a life preserver?" "Please," she assented. Charlie picked up his fork and thrust it through the hole of one of the doughnuts. Then he brought the fork, empty, around to her plate. He started in surprise, looking from the vacant tines of the fork to the doughnut which should have been there, but wasn't. He tried again to lift one of the doughnuts on the fork by its hole. Then, picking up his knife, he thrust the blade through the hole of a doughnut, twirled it up in the air, and caught it, as it came down, on the knife blade again. He transferred the doughnut from the knife to the plate of the cross-eyed man's wife, then placed a doughnut on the girl's plate the same way, and served one to himself. "They're wild things," Charlie remarked, "but they can be trained to come when you call them, by a little patience and skill." He was just about to take a bite of the doughnut to which he had helped himself, when he put it back on the plate again, untasted, with the doleful expression overspreading his countenance once more. The front door of the house had closed with a bang. And, in the next room, a voice which Charlie recognized as that of the crosseyed man who was the lord and master of the house, rose in tones of angry complaint. "I leave them on that bench for two minutes," was what Charlie heard him saying, "and when I come back they're gone ! That's the way they treat me. I can't turn my back, but they run away !'" Charlie heard the voice of the crosseyed man's friend, whom he had brought home with him, in the next room. "Maybe they didn't run away. How do you know they weren't kidnaped ?" The cross-eyed man laughed bitterly. "I'd like to see the man who would kidnap my wife, with that face of hers !" said he. "I'd like to see him — and shake him by the hand !" With an apologetic little laugh, Charlie looked around at the cross-eyed man's wife, who sat beside him at the table and could hear every word her husband said as plainly as he could. She rose, with her lips pressed together in a thin line, and marched into the next room. "You don't think any man would run away with me, do you?" Charlie heard her demand of her husband. "Well,