The royal guests were still at the palace, and in three minutes every one of them had heard the distressing news. Then began a search that was a search. Every corner, every crack of the great palace was looked into, not only once but over and over, for each one thought that he might perhaps see something that the others had passed by. Then the gardens were searched and the forests and the fields. All the subjects of the kingdom gave up their work and joined in the hunt. Every inch of the seashore was gone over and over, until it seemed as if some one had looked under every blade of grass and into every mouse-hole. They went to the cliff, of course, but the light steps of the Princess had left no trace, and they could not even guess what had become of her. The King was heartbroken, and the Queen lay on her bed, moaning her life away; but the young Prince was even more wretched than they. “Her father and mother have had her all those eighteen years,” he said to himself, “but I have found her only to lose her again.” After the Island Kingdom had been searched through and through, the King sent out every ship in the navy to look for his child, and all the stranger kings and princes whose ships lay at the royal wharves put out to sea to try to find the Star Princess. They sailed north and south and east and west, but they all came back with lowered flags and the same report, “We cannot find her.” The days passed. The royal guests bade farewell to the sorrowing King and Queen and sailed away to their own kingdoms, all but one, the faithful young Prince. “I cannot leave the place where I first met her,” he said to her parents. “Will you let me stay with you for a time?” Of course they were only too glad to have him; but one morning the young Prince, too, was missing. He had vanished from the Island Kingdom as suddenly as the Star Princess. It was known that he had left his rooms in the palace late in the evening; but this was a thing that he often did, especially on such moonlight nights as the one on which the Princess had vanished. So many times he had been seen pacing to and fro on the sand that no one thought of watching him or of noticing when he returned to the palace.