In spring the new buds are sheathed in hard husks. One warm morning after a shower they thrust aside these horny sheaths, and the tender foliage appears. It was so with Arminell. She had hitherto worn her better part, the generous qualities of her soul, in a hard and ungracious shell; now this shell had fallen off, and they broke forth, ready to expand and clothe her with a new and unexpected beauty. CHAPTER XLIV. FRAMING. Mr. James Welsh did all that was requisite for the arrangement of Arminell’s money-matters. She was entitled to her mother’s dower, sufficient to maintain her in easy circumstances. The settlement of her affairs with the trustees, guardians, and the solicitors of the family was a delicate transaction; Arminell authorised Welsh to act for her, and he managed with adroitness and tact, without grudging time or trouble. Meanwhile she remained an inmate of his villa in the Avenue, Shepherd’s Bush. She did not wish to be hasty in securing a house for herself and engaging a companion. She would not, however, encroach on the hospitality of the Welshes, and she insisted on becoming their lodger, paying them a moderate weekly sum for her board. They were not rich, their circumstances somewhat strait; it was an object with Mrs. Welsh to save the penny on the ’bus by walking to the railway arch; and though, in their exuberant hospitality, they would have cheerfully kept her as their guest, and treated her to the best they could afford, she insisted on their accepting her on her own terms, not on theirs. Only by degrees did she realise to the full extent what her social suicide implied. It was not possible for her to estimate its costs till she had committed the irrevocable act which severed her from the world to which she had belonged; as impossible, or almost as impossible as it is for the girl who jumps off London Bridge to conceive of the altered relations and strangeness of the region into which she will pass through the mud and water of the Thames.