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Teresa's heart was lying when she promised to consider herself dead to every man. The narrator asks ironically who can demand sincerity from the heart. For an attentive reader, the previous dialogue revealed a young woman of strong character, proud in love and little troubled by ordinary fears. Her surrender of her own will was not weakness, for it allowed her to resist her father's unpredictable wishes without open rebellion. It would be possible to call it cunning or hypocrisy, but insight is the fairest word. Teresa understood that loyalty often stumbles in life and that some honest ends can be reached only by indirect paths. The narrator considers such methods rare at an inexperienced age and sees Teresa's later fame through misfortune as proof that she was no ordinary figure.
In the letter recounting the previous scenes to Simão, Teresa tried to gain time with her father and protect the future without entering a convent or openly disobeying him. In that first account, she omitted Baltasar's threats because she knew that Simão's pride and violence would bring him from Coimbra at once. That, however, was not yet the letter that had surprised Simão at the end of the previous chapter.
For a time, Teresa's sky seemed calm, for Tadeu spoke neither of a convent nor of marriage, and Baltasar had returned to Castro Daire. Teresa sent this good news to Simão each week, while he studied without rest and spent his nights building his future glory in his imagination.
At dawn on a Sunday in June 1803, Teresa was summoned to accompany her father to the first Mass at the parish church. She dressed uneasily and found Tadeu in the antechamber, strangely pleasant, asking whether she wished to make her father's final years happy. Teresa's silence was a question. 'Today you will give your hand in marriage to your cousin Baltasar, and you must let your father guide you blindly.' Tadeu declared that some forms of happiness had to be imposed through violence and that a father's violence was always love. He boasted that he had not subdued her through ill-treatment, the severity of a convent or the loss of part of her inheritance. He said that he had waited for time to clear her reason and believed her now free from Simão's diabolical spell. He had not consulted her again because, according to him, reflection might damage the obedient enthusiasm of a good daughter.
Teresa was so distracted that she scarcely heard the first words and did not hear the last. Tadeu took her hands with pretended kindness and demanded an answer. 'What am I to answer you, Father?' Teresa asked in little more than a whisper. 'Will you give me what I ask and fill my remaining days with joy?' 'And will my father be happy with my sacrifice?' Tadeu rejected the word sacrifice and assured her that her soul would be transformed by the following day. He presented Baltasar as a collection of virtues, wealth, learning and good looks capable of making the perfect husband. With bitter irony, Teresa asked whether her cousin still wanted her after she had refused him. Her father replied that Baltasar was in love and fully confident that she would eventually love him. 'Is it not more certain that I shall hate him for ever, if I already detest him more than I thought possible?' 'Father, kill me, but do not force me to marry my cousin.' 'Force is useless, because I will not marry him.'
Tadeu's mask fell, and he shouted that Teresa would marry or be cursed for ever. He threatened to make her die in a convent and to give the house and inheritance to Baltasar. He swore that no infamous man would tread his ancestors' carpets and denied his daughter the family name and its rights. He ordered her into her room to await removal to another place where she would not see the light of the sun. Teresa rose without tears and entered her room calmly. Tadeu went to tell his nephew that he no longer had a daughter, for the wretch to whom he had given that name was lost to them all.
According to the narrator, the collection of excellences Tadeu saw in Baltasar lacked only one quality: honour. After the failure of that courtship prepared like an ambush, Baltasar promised to free Teresa's heart from Simão's siege. He advised against the convent because of the rumours public opinion would invent and proposed keeping Teresa at home until Simão returned from Coimbra. Only the narrator reveals that Baltasar hoped in this way to draw Simão into a new trap.
Tadeu accepted his nephew's reasoning, but Teresa saw only her father's unexpected calm and distrusted the change. She did not know Baltasar's hidden plan, but she suspected fresh violence and wrote to Simão at once. This time she told him everything, including Baltasar's threats, and ended the letter by warning that she feared a more dangerous scheme.
When he reached the threats, Simão could no longer see the words of the letter clearly and began to tremble. The narrator distinguishes that state from simple anguish in love: it was Simão's pride that set his blood on fire. His first impulse was to ride to Castro Daire and stab Baltasar in his own house. He hired a horse, dressed for the journey and grew furious with every minute of waiting. The half-hour delay, however, gave him time to remember the future of work and honour that love had promised him. He looked at the books in which Teresa's image had accompanied him and given him strength against the weariness of study and the restlessness of his temper. He realised that killing Baltasar would make him flee as a murderer, turn his father into his first enemy and fill Teresa with horror. His pride still told him that an unpunished threat was a dishonour, but love forced him to measure the cost of revenge.
Simão reread the letter twice, and on the third reading his rival's bluster seemed less offensive. The final lines contained tenderness, appeals to his love, hope for the future, renewed promises of constancy and deep longing. Those words proved that Baltasar's insults had not lowered Simão in Teresa's estimation. When the man with the horse arrived, Simão had abandoned the idea of killing Baltasar, but had decided to return secretly to Viseu to see Teresa.
He needed a safe house, for he would quickly be recognised at the town's inns. The carrier knew only a cousin who was a farrier and lived a quarter of a league from Viseu, and he agreed to take Simão there. Simão gave him a fur jacket and a scarlet silk sash, together with the promise of a greater reward if he kept that romantic enterprise secret. The next day, the student reached the farrier's house and was received cautiously. The carrier took a letter to a beggar woman in Viseu, who carefully checked who had sent it before returning with Teresa's reply.
The reply was a cry of joy: that evening Tadeu's birthday was being celebrated and the relatives would be gathered at the house. Teresa wrote that she would go to the garden at exactly eleven o'clock and open the gate for him. Simão had expected only to speak from the street to her window and was both delighted and frightened by the possibility of coming so close to her. The narrator observes that delight and fear travel together in love's first mysterious moments.
At eleven o'clock, Simão was leaning against the garden gate while the carrier waited at a distance holding the horse's reins. The music from the reception rooms surprised him, because for three years he had never heard a celebration in that normally silent house. Unable to understand fully the merriment in those rooms, he imagined bright hopes and dark dangers by turns. With his ear pressed to the lock, he could hear only the flutes and the beating of his own heart.