He could not, however, endure the noise of sawing and nailing which began as soon as Olver had spread out his dust-sheet on the floor, but took his bee-hive hat and stole quietly away from the room. He greatly preferred that Olver should do the work wrong, or even that he should pilfer in the room, than that he should himself have to remain at hand to supervise or to furnish any further directions. He therefore retreated to a bench at the remotest corner of the garden, hoping that Martha would not detect him, where, taking his book from his pocket, he gave himself up to his interrupted reading, to the pleasant accompaniment of the bees busy in the limes, and of the distant small noises of a summer day. He had soon forgotten Martha’s remonstrance, and vaguely relied as usual on Clare guessing his wishes, as indeed she always seemed to do, and seeing to it on his behalf that Olver Lovel made no impossible mistake over the shelves. Before Olver had been at work very long he became aware that Mr. Warrener was no longer in the room. He sat back on his heels and examined his surroundings. The soft carpet and deep chairs especially took his fancy, and he was much impressed by the spacious writing table littered with so many papers, and the number of reference books, held open at a special page by various incongruous objects, this one by a piece of flint, that one by a ruler, and yet a third by the shoe-horn brought down from Mr. Warrener’s dressing-table. Olver rose to his feet, and tip-toed about, looking at the books and at the specimens of pottery, bones, arrow-heads, and what not, in the show cases which composed Mr. Warrener’s little museum. Arrived at the chimney piece he came to a pause, for here he discovered an object which pleased him more than anything he had ever seen, namely a small circular mirror, mounted on a handle, which by reason of its convexity had the property of reflecting everything in a slight distortion,--small, brilliant, precise and peculiar. He was so fascinated by this toy that he ventured to pick it up; first he looked at his own face in it, and laughed childishly to see the widened cheek-bones, the slanting and Puckish eyes; then he turned it this way and that, to make it reflect different corners of the room; and finally he got a tiny picture of the garden in it, seen through the windows, with a miniature Mr. Warrener sitting on a bench, slightly out of focus, in the background. So absorbed was he that he did not notice the entrance of Clare; she came in, wearing a dress of sprigged muslin, and swinging her hat by its ribbons from her hand, and she entered with just that degree of nonchalance which would have led a shrewd observer to the certainty that she expected to find in the room some person other than the person she actually found. So it was that they both appeared, and Olver gaped at her, very much taken aback at being discovered on the side of the room opposite to his work, and with the mirror in his hand.