Not that he made any complaint. The poor fellow indeed seemed to be quite unconscious of his pain and weakness; but his ghastly pallor, his laboured breathing, and the convulsive shudders which agitated his frame from time to time were to George a tolerably clear indication that dissolution was near at hand. He was still quite light-headed, his mind wandering in feverish haste from scene to scene of his boyhood, as was evident from the rapid disjointed sentences which poured uninterruptedly from his lips. George was able to gather pretty clearly from them that, even as a lad, Walford had been wilful, headstrong, and obstinate, prone to go his own way without much consideration for the wishes of others, and there were occasional wild words and broken exclamations which seemed to indicate that, even whilst little more than a mere child, he had allowed himself to be betrayed into actual crime. And as he lay there, gasping his life away, the follies of boyhood and the graver offences of more recent days seemed to be in some way jumbled up hopelessly in his disordered mind with a confused idea of the urgent necessity for speedy repentance of both. There could be no doubt that, notwithstanding the disordered state of the unhappy man's intellect, conscience was busily at work with him; that he was already beginning to dimly see the error of his ways and the hollowness--the utter unprofitableness--of his past life, and possibly also the critical nature of his position. But the mind was too completely shattered to avail itself of these promptings, and the remorse and regret which had tardily come to him found expression only in the simple pleadings for pardon which a child offers to its grieved parent. This distressing state of things lasted at intervals all through the night and well into the following day, when the dying man, utterly exhausted, sank into a fitful, troubled sleep. The pangs of hunger and--still worse--of thirst again making themselves felt, George once more put the fishing-line over the side, and, after waiting patiently for nearly an hour, had the satisfaction of feeling a smart tug at it. He gave a sharp jerk, to strike the hook firmly into his fish, and at once began to haul smartly in, but he had only gathered in a foot or so of the line when there came a terrific pull at it, which sent the cord flying through his fingers in spite of all his efforts to hold it. He promptly called Tom to his assistance, but even with this aid he was unable to hold the fish; and, as a last resource, he threw a couple of turns round one of the thowl-pins. The result was disastrous; the line snapped short off at the pin, and when they came to investigate further, they found that they had lost the whole of it, except a bare fathom, which still remained in the boat.