“Well, just as you feel about it, my dear,” said George heartily. “He was a tidy old blighter, wasn’t he! Not much to do here after all! Oh, yes, his clothes. Mother said he took almost nothing with him that day, and the village people might as well have whatever’s here.” He went to set the carved leaves of the wardrobe ajar. “I’ll leave all that to you, Mrs. Pilton, you’ll know where they’ll come in handiest—”

“No, no, you shan’t touch his things!” cried Sabrina, and sprang up to snatch the wardrobe door out of his hand and slammed it shut and set her back against it protectively. “Haven’t you any feeling—haven’t you any common decency, to give his things away to the first village lout who happens to be the same size?”

“Sabrina!” gasped Aunt Effie, shocked to the core.

“Well, I—I see what you mean, of course,” said George uncomfortably, taken quite aback by so much vehemence in so negligible a creature as this thin girl had seemed to be. “But mother said the moth might be in them. We thought it would be rather a pity to waste things that some poor bloke might have a real use for—”

“You’ve no right to give away his things,” insisted Sabrina, and still flattened against the wardrobe she began to cry again in a weak, spent way, bent over side-wise as though she had a broken wing, thought George, watching her helplessly and wondering if the aunt couldn’t do something to stop her making all this row. “They belong here — they belong to him — please leave the room alone — please go away—”

“Sabrina, I think you had better come downstairs now,” Aunt Effie interposed futilely. “Mr. Shenstone will hardly know what to think of you—” Already her mind was composing one of the periodic domestic inventories which drove her brother out onto the Hills or into the museum at Wells until whatever it was had been dealt with in her own muddleheaded way. That any niece of mine should be so tactless in a situation which was already difficult enough, she would say—and it wasn’t as though she had the slightest right to be in the room at all, much less to interfere with Mr. Shenstone when he was only carrying out his mother’s wishes....

“Mrs. Pilton,” cried Sabrina, clinging to the wardrobe door, “promise you won’t take his things away! Promise you’ll leave his clothes—”

The housekeeper straightened from swathing the bed in white, and her eyes met Sabrina’s across it, and then went on to Aunt Effie’s dismayed face, and came at last to George, who was wishing he had brought his mother along to tell him what to do.

“I think, sir, that at least for the time being—”

“Very well, Mrs. Pilton, I leave it entirely to you,” he agreed hastily.

“Thank you, sir.”