Then he suddenly seemed to repent of his suspicions.

“At any rate, this Karl is a poor fellow, a mealy-mouthed simpleton who the minute I say anything opens his jaws like a fly-catcher.  He insists that he comes of a great family, but who knows anything about these gringoes? . . .  All of us, dead with hunger when we reach America, claim to be sons of princes.”

Madariaga had placed himself on a familiar footing with his Teutonic treasure, not through gratitude as with Desnoyers, but in order to make him feel his inferiority.  He had also introduced him on an equal footing in his home, but only that he might give piano lessons to his younger daughter.  The Romantica was no longer framing herself in the doorway—­in the gloaming watching the sunset reflections.  When Karl had finished his work in the office, he was now coming to the house and seating himself beside Elena, who was tinkling away with a persistence worthy of a better fate.  At the end of the hour the German, accompanying himself on the piano, would sing fragments from Wagner in such a way that it put Madariaga to sleep in his armchair with his great Paraguay cigar sticking out of his mouth.

Elena meanwhile was contemplating with increasing interest the singing gringo.  He was not the knight of her dreams awaited by the fair lady.  He was almost a servant, a blond immigrant with reddish hair, fat, heavy, and with bovine eyes that reflected an eternal fear of disagreeing with his chiefs.  But day by day, she was finding in him something which rather modified these impressions—­his feminine fairness, except where he was burned by the sun, the increasingly martial aspect of his moustachios, the agility with which he mounted his horse, his air of a troubadour, intoning with a rather weak tenor voluptuous romances whose words she did not understand.

One night, just before supper, the impressionable girl announced with a feverish excitement which she could no longer repress that she had made a grand discovery.

“Papa, Karl is of noble birth!  He belongs to a great family.”

The plainsman made a gesture of indifference.  Other things were vexing him in those days.  But during the evening, feeling the necessity of venting on somebody the wrath which had been gnawing at his vitals since his last trip to Buenos Aires, he interrupted the singer.

“See here, gringo, what is all this nonsense about nobility which you have been telling my girl?”

Karl left the piano that he might draw himself up to the approved military position before responding.  Under the influence of his recent song, his pose suggested Lohengrin about to reveal the secret of his life.  His father had been General von Hartrott, one of the commanders in the war of ’70.  The Emperor had rewarded his services by giving him a title.  One of his uncles was an intimate councillor of the King of Prussia.  His older brothers were conspicuous in the most select regiments.  He had carried a sword as a lieutenant.