Where was the old Teddy that she knew so well?  This side of him was the same, and it was a side that pleased her; but this was all she ever saw of him now.  Where was his sentimentality—­those old, varying moods of impetuous love-making, of fanciful, quixotic devotion, of heart-breaking gloom, of alternating, absurd tenderness and haughty dignity?  His nature had been a sensitive one, his temperament bordering closely on the artistic.  She knew that, besides being a follower of fashion and its fads and sports, he had cultivated tastes of a finer nature.  He had written things, he had tampered with colours, he was something of a student in certain branches of art, and once she had been admitted to all his aspirations and thoughts.  But now—­and she could not avoid the conclusion—­Teddy had barricaded against her every side of himself except one—­the side that showed the manager of the Rancho de las Sombras and a jolly chum who had forgiven and forgotten.  Queerly enough the words of Mr. Bannister’s description of her property came into her mind—­“all inclosed within a strong barbed-wire fence.”

“Teddy’s fenced, too,” said Octavia to herself.

It was not difficult for her to reason out the cause of his fortifications.  It had originated one night at the Hammersmiths’ ball.  It occurred at a time soon after she had decided to accept Colonel Beaupree and his million, which was no more than her looks and the entree she held to the inner circles were worth.  Teddy had proposed with all his impetuosity and fire, and she looked him straight in the eyes, an said, coldly and finally:  “Never let me hear any such silly nonsense from you again.”  “You won’t,” said Teddy, with an expression around his mouth, and—­now Teddy was inclosed within a strong barbed-wire fence.

It was on this first ride of inspection that Teddy was seized by the inspiration that suggested the name of Mother Goose’s heroine, and he at once bestowed it upon Octavia.  The idea, supported by both a similarity of names and identity of occupations, seemed to strike him as a peculiarly happy one, and he never tired of using it.  The Mexicans on the ranch also took up the name, adding another syllable to accommodate their lingual incapacity for the final “p,” gravely referring to her as “La Madama Bo-Peepy.”  Eventually it spread, and “Madame Bo-Peep’s ranch” was as often mentioned as the “Rancho de las Sombras.”

Came the long, hot season from May to September, when work is scarce on the ranches.  Octavia passed the days in a kind of lotus-eater’s dream.  Books, hammocks, correspondence with a few intimate friends, a renewed interest in her old water-colour box and easel—­these disposed of the sultry hours of daylight.  The evenings were always sure to bring enjoyment.  Best of all were the rapturous horseback rides with Teddy, when the moon gave light over the wind-swept leagues, chaperoned by the wheeling night-hawk and the startled owl.  Often the Mexicans would come up from their shacks with their guitars and sing the weirdest of heart-breaking songs.  There were long, cosy chats on the breezy gallery, and an interminable warfare of wits between Teddy and Mrs. MacIntyre, whose abundant Scotch shrewdness often more than overmatched the lighter humour in which she was lacking.