e with all the obsequious arrogance of a poor
relation at a feast. Her diffidence, her self-consciousness, her
timidity, were the outward forms of an inbred snobbery. It was curious
how suddenly all this was made clear to her....

At length she fell into a troubled sleep.... When she awoke the room's
outlines were reviving before the advances of early morning. For the
first time in her life she caught the poetry of the new day at first
hand. For years she had reveled vicariously in the delights of morning.
But it had always been to her a thing apart, a matter which the writers
of romantic verse beheld and translated for the benefit of late
sleepers. It never occurred to her that the day crawling into the
light-well of her Clay Street flat was lit with precisely the same flame
that colored the far-flung peaks of the poet's song. And instantly a
phrase of the Serbian's harangue came to her--blood-red dawn! He had
repeated these words over and over again, and somehow under the heat of
his ardor and longing for his native land this hackneyed phrase took on
its real and dreadful value. In the sudden sweep of this vital
remembrance, Claire Robson rose for a moment above the fretful drip of
circumstance.... _Blood-red Dawn_!... She threw herself back upon her
bed and shuddered....

She rose at seven o'clock, but already the morning had grown pallid and
flecked with gray clouds.

An apologetic tap came at the door, and the voice of Mrs. Robson
repeating a formula that she never varied:

"Better hurry, Claire. If you don't you'll be late for the office!"

CHAPTER II

As Claire stepped out into the cold sunlight of early November, she
smiled bitterly at the exaggeration of last night's mood. After the
first hectic flush of dawn there is nothing so sane and sweet and
commonplace as morning. The spectacle of Mrs. Finnegan, who lodged in
the flat below, slopping warm suds over the thin marble steps, added a
final note of homeliness, which divorced Claire completely from heroics.

"Well, Miss Robson, so you really got home, last night," broke from the
industrious neighbor as she straightened up and tucked her lifted skirts
in more securely. "I thought you never would come!... A package came
from New York for you. The man nearly banged your door down. I had
Finnegan put it on your back stoop.... It's from that cousin of yours, I
guess. I was so excited about it I kept wishing you'd get home early so
that I could get a pe