But the two years passed, and the relatives of Mrs. Armstrong were obliged to own that no such terrible result had happened to their niece. She appeared at their social gatherings, she rode with her uncle and cousin Charles on horseback, and drove round the Park with her aunts in an open carriage, showing plainly both in person, dress, and manners, that the study of domestic duties had not unfitted her for good society. Charles Herbert, the colonel's only child, was not only fond of his cousin Mary, but also a great admirer of his uncle Armstrong. Although scarcely old enough to retain a correct remembrance of the time when this uncle had snatched him from a watery grave, yet his mother had spoken of it to him so often that the impression made on his mind at four years of age had never been effaced. He once encountered Mary coming from the kitchen department with her curls tucked up beneath a white handkerchief, a large coarse apron before her, and her hands covered with flour. "Why, Mary," exclaimed the youth of nineteen, "what ever will you do? there is mamma at the door in her carriage wailing to take you for a drive!" "Come to the drawing-room, Charles, and wait for me," she said; "I will be ready to go with you and aunt in five minutes." "Then you must be Cinderella," he replied, as he followed her upstairs as far as the drawing-room, "and have a fairy to help you!" "So I have, and more than one," she replied, laughing, as she continued her flight upward. Mary's fairies were Neatness, Quickness, Order, and Method. Therefore in very few minutes more than the time she had named she presented herself in the drawing-room ready for her drive. All fear that domestic duties would make Mrs. Armstrong's daughter coarse or unrefined must have vanished at her appearance. She was simply attired in a pale violet silk dress and cape, with close-fitting gloves, lace collar and cuffs, and a broad-brimmed hat partly concealing her face, but not the profusion of auburn ringlets that fell around her shoulders. "How like you grow to your mother, my dear," said her aunt, as Mary, with the softness and refinement of that mother's manner, advanced to welcome her. And as she rose to accompany her niece to the carriage she said to herself, "Well, perhaps after all Edward is right--a woman is none the worse for understanding the management of household duties." One evening Mary was present at a family dinner-party at her uncle Sir James Elston's house in Portland Place. Very little had been said to the old sailor about what Mrs. Armstrong's sisters called the peculiar manner in which Edward Armstrong was educating his daughter, but that little had been met by him with a remark that silenced them-- "Making his girl domestic, is he? Wise man, wise man; that's all I can say."