Chapter Three
For Purity!
1
The cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be for ever gone, despised and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic device For Purity, whose ghost was to be raised by Mr Townshend over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat. For, his wretched Liberal being at last retrieved from somewhere beneath the foot of the poll, that gentleman was again among us, saying ‘hm’.
We have so far seen but the shadow of Mr Townshend; now, at last, this shadow must emerge into the tale of the weak Marches as the person of Mr Townshend of Magralt. He emerges, as becomes a man of property who belie
