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New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

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NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Head of the House of Coombe

F >> Frances Hodgson Burnett >> The Head of the House of Coombe




"She's very little and she won't understand," he had said to his
mother. "She's very little, really--perhaps she'll cry."

How monstrous it had seemed! Had she cried--poor little soul!
He looked down at her eyelashes. Her cheek had been of the same
colour and texture then. That came back to him too. The impulse to
tighten his arms was infernally powerful--almost automatic.

"She has no one but me to remember!" he heard his own child voice
saying fiercely. Good Lord, it WAS as if it had been yesterday.
He actually gulped something down in his throat.

"You haven't rested much," he said aloud. "There's a conservatory
with marble seats and corners and a fountain going. Will you let
me take you there when we stop dancing? I want to apologize to
you."

The eyelashes lifted themselves and made round her eyes the
big soft shadow of which Sara Studleigh had spoken. A strong and
healthy valvular organ in his breast lifted itself curiously at
the same time.

"To apologize?"

Was he speaking to her almost as if she were still four or five?
It was to the helplessness of those years he was about to explain--and
yet he did not feel as though he were still eight.

"I want to tell you why I never came back to the garden. It was
a broken promise, wasn't it?"

The music had not ceased, but they stopped dancing.

"Will you come?" he said and she went with him like a child--just
as she had followed in her babyhood. It seemed only natural to do
what he asked.

The conservatory was like an inner Paradise now. The tropically
scented warmth--the tiers on tiers of bloom above bloom--the
softened swing of music--the splash of the fountain on water and
leaves. Their plane had lifted itself too. They could hear the
splashing water and sometimes feel it in the corner seat of marble
he took her to. A crystal drop fell on her hand when she sat down.
The blue of his eyes was vaguely troubled and he spoke as if he
were not certain of himself.

"I was wakened up in what seemed to me the middle of the night,"
he said, as if indeed the thing had happened only the day before.
"My mother was obliged to go back suddenly to Scotland. I was only
a little chap, but it nearly finished me. Parents and guardians
don't understand how gigantic such a thing can be. I had promised
you--we had promised each other--hadn't we?"

"Yes," said Robin. Her eyes were fixed upon his face--open and
unmoving. Such eyes! Such eyes! All the touchingness of the past
was in their waiting on his words.

"Children--little boys especially--are taught that they must not
cry out when they are hurt. As I sat in the train through the
journey that day I thought my heart would burst in my small breast.
I turned my back and stared out of the window for fear my mother
would see my face. I'd always loved her. Do you know I think that
just then I HATED her. I had never hated anything before. Good
Lord! What a thing for a little chap to go through! My mother was
an angel, but she didn't KNOW."

"No," said Robin in a small strange voice and without moving her
gaze. "She didn't KNOW."

He had seated himself on a sort of low marble stool near her and
he held a knee with clasped hands. They were hands which held each
other for the moment with a sort of emotional clinch. His position
made him look upward at her instead of down.

"It was YOU I was wild about," he said. "You see it was YOU. I
could have stood it for myself. The trouble was that I felt I was
such a big little chap. I thought I was years--ages older than
you--and mountains bigger," his faint laugh was touched with pity
for the smallness of the big little chap. "You seemed so tiny and
pretty--and lonely."

"I was as lonely as a new-born bird fallen out of its nest."

"You had told me you had 'nothing.' You said no one had ever kissed
you. I'd been loved all my life. You had a wondering way of fixing
your eyes on me as if I could give you everything--perhaps it was
a coxy little chap's conceit that made me love you for it--but
perhaps it wasn't."

"You WERE everything," Robin said--and the mere simpleness of
the way in which she said it brought the garden so near that he
smelt the warm hawthorn and heard the distant piano organ and it
quickened his breath.

"It was because I kept seeing your eyes and hearing your laugh
that I thought my heart was bursting. I knew you'd go and wait for
me--and gradually your little face would begin to look different.
I knew you'd believe I'd come. 'She's little'--that was what I kept
saying to myself again and again. 'And she'll cry--awfully--and
she'll think I did it. She'll never know.' There,"--he hesitated
a moment--"there was a kind of mad shame in it. As if I'd BETRAYED
your littleness and your belief, though I was too young to know
what betraying was."

Just as she had looked at him before, "as if he could give her
everything," she was looking at him now. In what other way could
she look while he gave her this wonderful soothing, binding softly
all the old wounds with unconscious, natural touch because he had
really been all her child being had been irradiated and warmed
by. There was no pose in his manner--no sentimental or flirtatious
youth's affecting of a picturesque attitude. It was real and he
told her this thing because he must for his own relief.

"Did you cry?" he said. "Did my little chap's conceit make too
much of it? I suppose I ought to hope it did."

Robin put her hand softly against her heart.

"No," she answered. "I was only a baby, but I think it KILLED
something--here."

He caught a big hard breath.

"Oh!" he said and for a few seconds simply sat and gazed at her.

"But it came to life again?" he said afterwards.

"I don't know. I don't know what it was. Perhaps it could only
live in a very little creature. But it was killed."

"I say!" broke from him. "It was like wringing a canary's neck
when it was singing in the sun!"

A sudden swelling of the music of a new dance swept in to them
and he rose and stood up before her.

"Thank you for giving me my chance to tell you," he said. "This
was the apology. You have been kind to listen."

"I wanted to listen," Robin said. "I am glad I didn't live a long
time and grow old and die without your telling me. When I saw you
tonight I almost said aloud, 'He's come back!'"

"I'm glad I came. It's queer how one can live a thing over again.
There have been all the years between for us both. For me there's
been all a lad's life--tutors and Eton and Oxford and people and
lots of travel and amusement. But the minute I set eyes on you
near the door something must have begun to drag me back. I'll own
I've never liked to let myself dwell on that memory. It wasn't a
good thing because it had a trick of taking me back in a fiendish
way to the little chap with his heart bursting in the railway
carriage--and the betrayal feeling. It's morbid to let yourself
grouse over what can't be undone. So you faded away. But when I
danced past you somehow I knew I'd come on SOMETHING. It made me
restless. I couldn't keep my eyes away decently. Then all at once
I KNEW! I couldn't tell you what the effect was. There you were
again--I was as much obliged to tell you as I should have been if
I'd found you at Braemarnie when I got there that night. Conventions
had nothing to do with it. It would not have mattered even if
you'd obviously thought I was a fool. You might have thought so,
you know."

"No, I mightn't," answered Robin. "There have been no Eton and
Oxford and amusements for me. This is my first party."

She rose as he had done and they stood for a second or so with their
eyes resting on each other's--each with a young smile quivering
into life which neither was conscious of. It was she who first
wakened and came back. He saw a tiny pulse flutter in her throat
and she lifted her hand with a delicate gesture.

"This dance was Lord Halwyn's and we've sat it out. We must go
back to the ball room."

"I--suppose--we must," he answered with slow reluctance--but he
could scarcely drag his eyes away from hers--even though he obeyed,
and they turned and went.

In the shining ball room the music rose and fell and swelled again
into ecstasy as he took her white young lightness in his arm and
they swayed and darted and swooped like things of the air--while
the old Duchess and Lord Coombe looked on almost unseeing and
talked in murmurs of Sarajevo.

THE END

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

The inflexible limitations of magazine space necessitated the
omission--in its serial form--of so large a portion of THE
HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE as to eliminate much of the charm
of characterization and the creation of atmosphere and background
which add so greatly to the power and picturesqueness of the
author's work.

These values having been unavoidably lost in a greatly compressed
version, it is the publishers' desire to produce the story in its
entirety, and, as during its writing it developed into what might
be regarded as two novels--so distinctly does it deal with two
epochs--it has been decided to present it to its public as two
separate books. The first, THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE, deals
with social life in London during the evolutionary period between
the late Victorian years and the reign of Edward VII and that of
his successor, previous to the Great War. It brings Lord Coombe
and Donal, Feather and her girl Robin to the summer of 1914. It
ends with the ending of a world which can never again be the same.
The second novel, ROBIN, to be published later continues the story
of the same characters, facing existence, however, in a world
transformed by tragedy, and in which new aspects of character, new
social, economic, and spiritual possibilities are to be confronted,
rising to the surface of life as from the depths of unknown seas.
Readers of THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE will follow
the story of Robin with intensified interest.