And now there was careful snipping, and long ribbons of black paper curled unheeded round the legs of the operators.
“I wish we were born photographers like the man who took Aunt Edith and you on the beach with the donkey,” said Edred nervously, as he began to pass the film in and out of the water in pie-dish Number One.
“Oh, be sure there are no air-bubbles!” said Elfrida; “you might let me do some of it.”
“You shall do the next one,” said Edred, almost holding his breath.
Dear reader, do you recall the agitating moment when you pass the film through the hypo—and hold it up to the light—and nothing happens? Do you remember the painful wonder whether you may have forgotten to set the shutter? Or whether you have got hold of an unexposed film by mistake? Your breath comes with difficulty, your fingers feel awkward, and the film is unnaturally slippery. You dip it into the hypo-bath again, and draw it through and through with the calmness of despair.
“I don’t believe it’s coming out at all,” you say.
And then comes the glorious moment when you hold it up again to the red light and murmur rapturously, “Ah! it is beginning to show!”
If you will kindly remember all the emotions of those exciting moments—on an occasion, let us say, when you had not had your camera very long—then multiply by seven million, add x—an unknown quantity of an emotion quite different from anything you have ever felt—and you will have some idea of what Edred and Elfrida felt when the first faint, grey, formless patches began to appear on the film.
But you might multiply till you had used up the multiplication table, and add x’s as long as you could afford them, and yet never imagine the rapture with which the two children saw the perfect development of the six little perfect pictures. For they were perfect. They were perfect pictures of Arden Castle at a time when it, too, was perfect. No broken arches, no crumbling wall, but every part neat and clear-cut as they had seen it when they went into the past that was three hundred years ago.
They were equally fortunate with the second film. It, too, had its six faultless pictures of Arden Castle three hundred years ago. And the last film developed just as finely. Only, just before the moment which was the right moment for taking the film out of the hypo-bath and beginning to wash it, a tiny white feather fell out of Edred’s hair into the dish. It was so tiny that in that dim light he did not notice it. And it did not stick to the film or do any of those things which you might have feared if you had seen the little, white thing flutter down. It may have been the feather’s doing; I don’t know. I just tell you the thing as it happened.