Langly did not sleep that night, and was gaunt and haggard in the morning. The coroner’s jury trooped up the stair, and, after looking at the dead girl, adjourned to the Vestry Hall. Langly gave his evidence, and, leaving the room at once, hovered about the door, waiting for Braunt, who remained in the Vestry Hall. At last he came out, with white face, staring straight ahead of him. “What did they say?” asked Langly; but the other did not answer, striding through the curious crowd as if he saw nothing. “What was the verdict?” inquired a bystander of one of the jurymen as he came out. “Starved to death,” replied the man. CHAPTER XVIII. On the day after Marsten’s failure to win a majority of the men to his side in the strike controversy, the young man went to Wimbledon, hoping to find consolation for his defeat in the company of the girl he loved. He felt that he was perhaps taking a rather unfair advantage of Sartwell in thus making a clandestine appointment with his daughter, but he justified himself, as lovers have always justified themselves, by claiming that a man was a fool to lose a trick when he had the card in his hand to take it. It was evident that Sartwell had no objection to the visits of Barnard Hope, and that he would be quite willing to have his daughter marry the son of his employer. If Marsten had known this the day before, he would not have been so self-denying as to refuse to see Edna Sartwell, and now that fate had interposed in his behalf, giving him the knowledge that he had a rival, he was not going to be idiot enough to throw away his chance. He entered the vacant plot surrounding the empty house, and looked anxiously along the glass-topped wall for the signal that Edna had promised, under compulsion, to display. It was not in sight. He wondered if, after all, the girl had told her father of his visit. Let Sartwell get but the slightest inkling of it, and Marsten was certain the whole particulars would soon be within the manager’s knowledge. He wandered up and down the wrong side of the wall disconsolately, not knowing what to do. Once he paused near where he had, on the previous day, jumped over. He thought he heard a slight cough on the other side. It might be a warning, or an invitation: the question was, which? She must know that he would be there, waiting for her signal; or perhaps--the thought was bitter--she might have forgotten all about him.