CHAPTER III

A MYSTERIOUS DEATH


To be the husband of a celebrated woman is not an unmixed
blessing. Mr. Peter Octagon found it to be so, when he
married Mrs. Saxon, the widow of an eminent Q.C. She was a
fine Junoesque tragic woman, who modelled herself on the
portraits of the late Mrs. Siddons. Peter, on the contrary,
was a small, meek, light-haired, short-sighted man, who had
never done anything in his unromantic life, save accumulate a
fortune as a law-stationer. For many years he lived in single
blessedness, but when he retired with an assured income of
three thousand a year, he thought he would marry. He had no
relatives, having been brought up in a Foundling Hospital, and
consequently, found life rather lonely in his fine Kensington
house. He really did not care about living in such a mansion,
and had purchased the property as a speculation, intending to
sell it at a profit. But having fallen in with Mrs. Saxon,
then a hard-up widow, she not only induced him to marry her,
but, when married, she insisted that the house should be
retained, so that she could dispense hospitality to a literary
circle.

Mrs. Octagon was very literary. She had published several
novels under the nom-de-plume of "Rowena." She had produced a
volume of poems; she had written a play which had been
produced at a matinee; and finally her pamphlets on political