It is not Mary Ambrey’s way to ask questions, and Martyn did not elucidate. He only looked as though he were seeing again something that might have struck him that afternoon, and repeated, with a rather derisive inflection in his cocksure young voice, “_That_ woman hard?” The “Bulbul Ameer” play was gradually being built up, under the usual frightful difficulties, by a number of people who were all determined to help. The Kendals faithfully attended every rehearsal _en bloc_, although only Alfred and Amy were to take parts, Amy being alleged by Mumma to be possessed of a voice. “Not a great deal of Ear perhaps--not one of them has an ear, I’m afraid--but Amy certainly has a Voice. I’ve said from the days when they were all little tots together, that Amy certainly had a voice. Don’t you remember, girls, my telling you long ago that Amy was the only one with a voice?” The Kendals, of course, remembered quite well. They never fail Mumma. Amy and the Voice were admitted into the cast and that, as Bill Patch said, was all right. But it didn’t entitle Alfred Kendal to come out in the new, and insufferable, guise in which he presently appeared. (“I do think that amateur theatricals bring out all that is worst in human nature,” Sallie thoughtfully remarked to me once.) “Ahlfred,” as his family persist in calling him, was at home for a few weeks. During the hours of rehearsal, from regarding him as a pleasant, if unexciting, fellow creature, we all came to look upon him as something that could only have been sent to try us. It was disappointing when Amy read the words of the opening chorus for the first time, that her only comment should be: “Well, I suppose if we’ve got to make fools of ourselves, it can’t be helped, and once we’re worked up to it, I daresay it won’t be so bad”--but it was positively infuriating when Alfred, in an instructive voice, began to make a number of suggestions all beginning with “Why not.” “Why not alter this a bit, here, Patch--you see what I mean? You say ‘The Muscovite Maiden comes on from the O. P. side.’ Now, why not have her come on from the other side?” “Why?” “Well, wouldn’t it be effective? And why not bring in an allusion to the moon, in that final song? Always a success, the moon, in a show like this. Why not arrange an effect of some sort with a moderator lamp behind the scene? I’ve seen wonders done with a moderator lamp.” “Fancy, a moderator lamp!” said Mrs. Kendal. “I think, as it’s supposed to be early morning in the first scene, that perhaps the moon would be out of place,” Nancy Fazackerly suggested apologetically. And Alfred, with something of his mother’s singular powers of reiteration, said, “Why not make it the evening instead?” “I think we ought to get on a bit. We’ll take the Muscovite maiden’s song. Sallie!” I called. She sang it well, and the lyric was rather a pretty one. “What about encores?” Alfred Kendal enquired, looking alertly round him. “We haven’t quite got to that yet.”