G. B. Stern

[Phoebe H. Gilkyson in The Philadelphia Inquirer Jul 2 1932] [Published in Great Britain as Little Red Horses]

Halycon Day's mother was as sentimental a woman as her child's name indicates. Upon her death, when Halcyon is 11, her English sea-captain father arrives in New York to claim his little girl, and finds her an infant prodigy, a child-poet who gives public readings of her verse, a spoiled darling of the spot-light. Horrified, he abruptly carries her away from adoring maternal relatives and takes her to his sister in England.

His methods are as bad in their way as her mother's turgid ones. In a fox-hunting, out-door-loving countryside children who write poetry are considered "little beasts". Halcyon, who is actually better-read and more perceptive than the adults about her, is snubbed and scolded and made to feel an outcast until she stumbles upon a waif as odd as herself. Eden, a red-headed stripling of 12, supports a large family by his work on the stage. He is precocious in his knowledge of the world as Halcyon in her book-knowledge, and a strange powerful attachment develops between the two.

For the next few years the two think only of each other, scheming, plotting and lying in order to meet. Then a bitter quarrel -- no childish matter -- separates them. Their reunion three years later is a dramatic one...