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.