It is probable that Jocelyn tackled the matter with the utmost delicacy. Fundamentally, he had the instincts of a gentleman, and, as Gabrielle knew, he loved her; but on this one subject no amount of entreaties or tenderness could make her speak. In the end, when he could get nothing out of her, he compelled himself to tell her of Biddy's suspicions. It seemed to him that this might force her into a full confession of her relations with her lover. It did nothing of the sort. She simply stood clutching a tall oak chair and looking straight out of the window over the dark woods. Then she said: "Does Biddy really think I am going to have a baby?" And Jocelyn nodded his head. Then she said nothing more. She simply went out of the room like a sleep-walker, leaving poor Jocelyn overwhelmed with misery by a silence that he interpreted as an admission of guilt. For him, at any rate, the matter was settled and the acuteness of Biddy Joyce finally established. And there one must leave it. Gabrielle herself accepted the verdict without question, but whether from her own secret knowledge or out of an innocence that is almost incredible but not, in her case, impossible, I cannot say. Naturally enough, in that other strange interview with Mrs. Payne, she did not go into details, and as far as we are concerned the truth will never be known. Not that it really matters. The only thing that concerns us is the effect upon her fortunes of this real or imaginary catastrophe. All that we can say is that when she walked out of the Roscarna dining-room after her hour with Jocelyn she was subtly and curiously changed. From that moment she became, in fact, a person hypnotised, possessed by the contemplation of her approaching motherhood. She was no longer restless or tearful. She began to sleep again, and her sleep was no longer troubled by that recurrent dream. A strange calm descended on her, the calm of a Madonna thrilled by an angelic annunciation--a hallucinated calm that made her remote and independent, utterly unmoved by the commotion into which the household of Roscarna had been thrown.