Three days passed thus, and it was now the afternoon of the first day of the Revels. In consequence, the telegraph and telephone lines down to Port Washington were congested with messages, for the greater part of the evening papers in New York had kept their first page open for them, and nothing could be sent to press until it was known in what manner the first afternoon would be spent. A good deal, of course, was ready to be set up, for the list of the guests was public property, and their dresses could be, even if imagined only, described; but as long as the lagoon on the shore held its secret, the page could not be made up. It was known also that there would be a ball at Mon Repos in the evening, and that the walls of the ball-room were to be covered--literally covered, as a paper covers a wall--with roses. But for the secret of the lagoon the papers had to wait, since it had been inviolably kept. Another event, too, hardly less momentous, hung in the balance, for only two days before the reigning Prince of Saxe-Hochlaben, a dissolute young man of twenty-five, with a limp, a past, and no future, had arrived like a thunderbolt in New York. Now, to the frivolous and lightminded this does not seem a world-curdling event, but that very enlightened paper, the New York _Gutter Snipe_, was not frivolous, and with extreme rapidity it set the red flame of war ablaze when it announced in huge headlines: 'ARRIVAL of HIS ROYAL TRANSPARENCY THE PRINCE OF SAXE-HOCHLABEN. Mrs. LEWIS S. PALMER'S REVELS DOOMED TO DIRE FAILURE. FRITZ (that was his name) PROMISES TO FAVOUR MRS. JOHN Z. ADELBODEN AT NEWPORT.' The editor of the _Gutter Snipe_, it may be remarked, had once been a man of enormous wealth, and had honoured Mr. Palmer by singling him out as an adversary in a certain financial campaign. Mr. Palmer had dropped quite a number of little notes on to the floor over him, and he was now poor but spiteful. The effect of his announcement was magical, for there was already war to the knife between Mrs. John Z. Adelboden and Mrs. Palmer, the latter of whom had planted her standard at Long Island in direct defiance of Newport; and those headlines brought things to a crisis. The news of his arrival was of course telegraphed to Newport by the _Gutter Snipe_, which did not telegraph it to Mon Repos. Consequently Mrs. John Z. Adelboden knew it by mid-day (the _Germanic_ having come in at 11.49), whereas it went down to Long Island in the ordinary issue of the paper. Thus, Mrs. John Z. Adelboden had seven hours' start.