Arrived in the dark-room, she found that only one of the double slides possessed its piece of black card for dividing the two plates. A search for the missing necessaries delayed her a good deal, and might have ruffled her temper had she not become resigned to photographic muddles.
“Here I am at last!” she remarked cheerfully, as she came up to Austin, who remained seated in philosophic calm on the top of a five-barred gate. “There were no cards in two of the slides.”
“Oh!” remarked Austin, “I thought perhaps you’d lost the cap.”
“I had lost it!”
“Well—it might have lost itself. Thank you ever so much for going.”
“Let’s make a start, Austin. The sun’s sinking down into the mist.”
“That’s all right. It says in my photographic handbook there are ‘immense possibilities in mist and cloud’; and also, that ‘there is pictorial value in a gate or a stile carefully placed’. Now, I haven’t been wasting my time while you’ve been away; I’ve been thinking over what that chap wrote. And I’ve made up my mind to get the mist and the cloud and this gate into my photograph.”
“Likewise the windmill, the group of poplars, and the whole expanse of Nature, I presume?” observed Frances sarcastically.
“I dare say I could edge in the poplars—my lens has a wide field,” said the photographer. “The windmill is behind our backs.”
“I thought you were going to take the village. And you can’t see the village through the gate or over it. You must open the gate and go into the field to get the view we wanted.”