Despite her disclaimer made to Banneker she felt, deep within the placid acceptances of subconsciousness, that the destruction of a train was not too much for a considerate Providence to undertake on behalf of her petted and important self.  She clearly realized that she had had a narrow escape from Holmesley; that his attraction for her was transient and unsubstantial, a surface magnetism without real value or promise.

In her revulsion of feeling she thought affectionately of Delavan Eyre.  There lay the safe basis of habitude, common interests, settled liking.  True, he bored her at times with his unimpeachable good-nature, his easy self-assurance that everything was and always would be “all right,” and nothing “worth bothering over.”

If he knew of her escapade, that would at least shake him out of his soft and well-lined rut.  Indeed, Io was frank enough with herself to admit that a perverse desire to explode a bomb under her imperturbable and too-assured suitor had been an element in her projected elopement.  Never would that bomb explode.  It would not even fizzle enough to alarm Eyre or her family.  For not a soul knew of the frustrated scheme, except Holmesley and the reliable friend in Paradiso whom she was to visit; not her father, Sims Welland, traveling in Europe on business, nor her aunt, Mrs. Thatcher Forbes, in whose charge she had been left.  Ostensibly she had been going to visit the Westerleys, that was all:  Mrs. Forbes’s misgivings as to a twenty-year-old girl crossing the continent alone had been unavailing against Io’s calm willfulness.

Well, she would go back and marry Del Eyre, and be comfortable ever after.  After all, liking and comprehension were a sounder foundation for matrimony than the perishable glamour of an attraction like Holmesley’s.  Any sensible person would know that.  She wished that she had some older and more experienced woman to talk it out with.  Miss Van Arsdale, if only she knew her a little better....

Camilla Van Arsdale, even on so casual an acquaintance, would have told Io, reckoning with the slumbering fire in her eyes, and the sensitive and passionate turn of the lips, but still more with the subtle and significant emanation of a femininity as yet unawakened to itself, that for her to marry on the pallid expectancies of mere liking would be to invite disaster and challenge ruin.

Meantime Io wanted to rest and think.

Time enough for that was to be hers, it appeared.  Her first night as a guest had been spent in a semi-enclosed porch, to which every breeze wafted the spicy and restful balm of the wet pines.  Io’s hot brain cooled itself in that peace.  Quite with a feeling of welcome she accepted the windy downpour which came with the morning to keep her indoors, as if it were a friendly and opportune jailer.  Reaction from the mental strain and the physical shock had set in.  She wanted only, as she expressed it to her hostess, to “laze” for a while.