The word was too strong, but Rex could not see that it was so. It seemed to him that by all the wild indulgence of his imagination he had fostered that growth of which he had so suddenly been made aware. He could no longer separate the intention from the fact, and he believed himself guilty of both alike, though he was in reality but the victim of circumstances and the sport of a cruel destiny. Everything combined to bring about the unavoidable result, the fatal tendency to suicide that existed in his blood, the excessive emotion of a heart unused to feel, the despair of an absolutely hopeless love, the horror of a self that seemed all at once blackened by the most hideous treachery, even the constitutional fearlessness of a man to whom the moment of death offered no terrors; everything was present which could drive Rex over the brink, and everything was absent which might have held him back.

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