But there was at least one person present who accepted the decision with a bad grace--Ingra. He had been sure of victory in his incomprehensible persecution of us, he had played a master card, and now his disappointment was written upon his face. With surprise, I saw Ala approach him, smiling, and I was convinced that she was trying to persuade him to cease his opposition. There was a gentleness in her manner--almost a deference--which grated upon my feelings, while Jack's disgust could find no words sufficient to express itself: "Beauty and the beast!" he growled. "By Jo, if _he's_ got any influence over her, I'm sorry for her." "Well, well, don't worry about him," I said. "He's played his hand and lost, and if you were in his place, you wouldn't feel any better about it." "No, I'd go and hang myself, and that's what he ought to do. But isn't _she_ a queen, though!" Ala now resumed her place upon the throne, and issued orders which resulted in our being conducted to apartments that were set aside for us in the palace. There were four connecting rooms, and Juba had one of them. But we immediately assembled in the chief apartment, which had been assigned to Edmund. There was much more deference in the manner of our attendants than we had observed before, and as soon as they left us we fell to discussing the recent events. Jack's first characteristic act was joyously to slap Juba on the back: "Bully old boy!" he exclaimed. "Edmund, where'd we have been without Juba?" "I ought to have foreseen that," said Edmund. "If I had been as wise as I sometimes think myself, I'd have arranged the thing differently. Of course it should have been obvious all the while that Juba would be our trump card. I dimly saw that, but I ought to have instructed him in advance. As it was, his own intelligence did the business. He understood my claim to an origin outside this planet, when they could not. It must have come over him all at a flash." "But do you think that they understand it now?" I asked. "To a certain extent, yes. But it is an utterly new idea to them, and all the better for us that it is so. It is so much the more mysterious; so much the more effective with the imagination. But this is not the end of it; they will want to know more--especially Ala--and now that Juba has broken the ice, it will be comparatively easy to fortify the new opinion which they have conceived of us." "But Ingra nearly wrecked it all," I remarked. "Yes, that was a stunning surprise. How devilish cunning the fellow is; and how inexplicable his antipathy to us." "I believe that it is a kind of jealousy," I said. "A kind of natural cussedness, _I_ guess," put in Jack. "Why should he be jealous?" asked Edmund. "I don't know, exactly; but you know we are not simple barbarians in their eyes, and Ingra may have conceived a prejudice against us, somehow, on that very account."