And after that night, he set his face to the west and he went on, disregarding what the going cost him, little realizing that he was suddenly carrying his High Aspiration written large on his fighting face for the World and One Woman to see! VI Back in her apartment, Bernice picked up the packet of faded love notes, untied the string with sneering amusement and selected a letter at random. She read and the sneer disappeared. She picked up another and read and the worldliness fell from her face. She picked up a third, a fourth, a fifth. She did not read the sixth. Face downward in the tapestry pillows, she sobbed out her heart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XI MAN’S WORLD I The Czar had been deposed in the opening weeks of March. Sturmer, Golitsyn and Protopopov had been arrested. The Imperial Russian family were under tragic detention in Tsarkoë-Selo Palace. On March 15 came the coalition cabinet of the revolutionists. As April began, the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates were declaring it necessary for them to control the course of the provisional government. Events were moving in seven-league boots in the land of the luckless Romanoffs. But where they were moving or what would be the state of affairs when the moving was ended, no one dared to predict. Nathan sailed from San Francisco on the first day of April. Queer emotions played through him as the big Japanese liner, _Tenyo Maru_, turned its prow about, started its engines, gathered speed away from the line of handkerchiefs, cheers and tears along the dock, down the harbor, past the Presidio, followed by swarms of crying gulls out through the Golden Gate, off into the mystic West which strangely becomes the East again. Much might happen before he next saw the clock on the Market Street ferry-house tower. As the land dropped lower behind the ship and the flocks of gulls thinned out and the arms of the Pacific opened wider and wider, a sense of vast freedom came to Nathan. Those broad ocean reaches stirred deep reactions within him. They beckoned him away from petty things. Hour after hour he walked the _Tenyo’s_ decks or sank down in his steamer chair and dozed there, sending dream-cargoes off across the miles. Every day carried him farther from the handicap, sordidness, mediocrity, trial, pose, struggle, which had been the sum and substance of his life and environment to date. Something big and vital must transpire out in this world whence he was going. He would look for it. It was all in the epilogue of Going On. Entering the dining saloon for lunch on April 6, he found beside his plate a copy of the little daily news sheet filled with items received by wireless. America had declared war.