“And I hope, Allan, you’ll never want to go in those dreadful places any more. I like pictures of pleasant places and nice-looking people.”
“It takes all sorts of people to make a world,” said Allan, rinsing a tray under the tap.
“Yes,” admitted Edith, “but you don’t need to mix with all sorts.”
After supper Allan began his developing, and Dr. Hartel was with him for fully an hour, long enough to see the picture of Sporty and the Bowery shoe-black, and the group of boys around the “Lemonade Man.”
It was all very fascinating, this work in the red glow of the lamp,—the moments of expectation until the first signs of the image appeared, the slow growth of the picture under the ripple of the developer, the glimpse of the clear negative after the fixing. The trickle of the water from the washing-box was real music to Allan.
Of course there were disappointments in some of the plates, resulting from mistakes in the focussing, from intrusive foreground figures, from too rapid movements that made a blur. But there were compensations too, for there were many unexpectedly interesting things in the pictures, things not seen by Allan at the moment of pressing his trigger, funny gestures of people, droll expressions of faces.
“The ‘Lemonade Man.’”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Allan left his last plates washing and went into the house to report on his successes and failures. He carried with him a rack holding the first dozen of the plates, which he wanted to study in the better light of the sitting-room lamp. This lamp had a plain ground-glass shade, which made just the right relief for the image of a negative.
Half an hour later, when Allan returned to the stable, he found the door at the foot of the stairs slightly ajar. This reminded him of the night his plates were stolen. It set him thinking very quickly.