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 peep at all the pretty things.  But I’ll run up just as soon as I get through with the breakfast dishes.”

Claire smiled wanly.  “It was very good of you to take all that trouble, I’m sure, Mrs. Finnegan!”

“Oh, bother my trouble!” Mrs. Finnegan responded.  “I just knew how crazy I’d be about a box.  I guess we women are all alike, Miss Robson.  Anyway, your mother and I are!”