“He isn’t dead, is he?”

Rex’s voice was hardly more than a whisper as he put the awful question.  Sydney certainly looked almost like a corpse, with his pallid face and his head hanging itself lifelessly over on one side.

It was a trying situation for the two boys.  Neither of them had had the slightest experience with cases of this sort.  It was so late in the afternoon that the offices around them were all empty.

“No, he is not dead, I’m sure of that,” Scott replied, who, as the senior of Rex by some eleven months, felt that it was natural for the other to seem to rely upon him.  “We ought to have a doctor at once, though.”

“But we can’t leave him that way while I go for one.  Besides, I don’t know where to go.”

“Neither do I. Our doctor is clear at the other end of town and besides he’s down at Atlantic City by this time anyway.”

“It’s awful, isn’t it?  Oh, what shall we do, Scott?”

“We might ring for an ambulance.  That’s the quickest way.”

“Oh, we don’t want to have him taken to the hospital.  Come, help me get him out of that chair.  It’s horrible to see his head hang over like that.”

“But where can we put him?  There’s no lounge about, is there?”

“No, but we might let him lie on the floor, on that rug yonder.  See, we can take this cushion out of this chair for a pillow.”

With much difficulty, for they felt that they must go about the work of transfer with the greatest care, the unconscious man was removed and placed in what both boys considered would be an easier position for him.  But when he was stretched out at their feet, the spectacle was such an ominous one that Rex almost wished that they had left him where he was.

“Don’t you think we ought to throw water in his face or fan him or something?” he asked helplessly.

“I don’t know what we ought to do, Rex, except I think we ought to have a doctor the first thing.  I tell you!  You stay here with him and I’ll go down and find a drug store.  They’ll know where I can get a doctor there.”

“All right; be as quick as you can.”

Scott was off on the instant and Rex was left alone with the unconscious Sydney.  His mind was filled with a multitude of thoughts in regard to the strange seizure.  Was he, Reginald, responsible for it?  What if he had not come to Philadelphia, would it have happened?

He tried to console himself with the reflection that the thing was bound to occur any way, and that it was providential that he and Scott were present to give aid.

Then he remembered how the attack had come on at the very moment when Sydney learned that he (Rex) had told of their inheritance from the miser, and he felt more dismal than ever.

It was very quiet in that great office building at this time of the day.  The noise of the car bells and traffic that came in through the open windows from the street far below only made the stillness within more marked.  The office boy had taken the mail and gone home just before Rex and Scott arrived.