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The narrator presents a loosely connected incident revealing another side of Domingos Correia Botelho, Viseu's former magistrate. Manoel Botelho, Simão's elder brother, had resumed studying mathematics in Coimbra. He then fled to Spain with the unnamed wife of an Azorean medical student. The fugitives lived in Coruña for a year. Rita Preciosa supported them by gradually selling her jewellery. This deprived her daughters of the ornaments expected for their age and rank. After a year, the money ran out. Rita wrote that she had stopped supporting Simão for lack of means. Rita used her small savings to repay whoever had compassionately fed Simão in Viseu and was still supporting him in Porto. Rita advised Manoel to return to Vila Real with the woman. Manoel would stay home and the woman at an inn until housed; Domingos lived apart from the family at Montezelos.
Travelling through Minho, Manoel reached Porto with her fifteen days after Simão entered prison. The brothers had never cared for each other. His misfortune made people forgive the temperament that had estranged Simão from his parents; he retained tenderness only for his younger sister Rita. Manoel opened his arms to his brother in prison; Simão received him coldly. Manoel asked about the disaster; Simão said it was in the case papers. Asked about release, he said he gave it no thought. Short of money and returning home, Manoel offered his brother some of his clothes. Simão refused: he accepted alms only from Mariana. Mariana's beauty led Manoel to false conclusions. Asked about Mariana, Simão called her an angel and said he could explain no more. Mariana introduced herself as servant to both Simão and Manoel. Mariana said she came from outside Viseu; Manoel asked if she had always accompanied Simão. Mariana hesitated, but Simão interrupted, saying that Manoel's curiosity troubled him. Manoel thought the question harmless and, as he left, asked whether Simão had a message for their mother; the answer was no.
That afternoon, while Manoel packed for Vila Real, the appellate judge Mourão Mosqueira and the crime magistrate visited him. The magistrate said police surveillance had found his former colleague Domingos's son, and both officials offered help. Asked whether the Azorean woman was his wife, Manoel stammered that she was his sister. Mourão remembered Manoel's three sisters and was surprised to recognise none of them in the woman. He asked whether she was Ana Amália, and Manoel confirmed that false identity. Mourão praised her beauty despite her completely different face.
The magistrate asked whether they had seen Simão; Manoel said they had visited his poor brother. Mourão likened Simão's disaster to a thunderbolt striking the family but said the death sentence would not be carried out. He told Manoel to repeat this assurance to their mother. According to Mourão, the court was prepared to reduce the sentence to ten years of exile in India. Domingos had prepared appeals in the higher courts despite Baltasar's powerful relatives in those institutions. They wished to acquit Simão, but his proud confession to killing Baltasar made that impossible. He would not even permit a self-defence claim. Mourão called him a wretched madman with noble feelings. Letters from influential people backed the Albuquerques and openly demanded Simão's head, he added. Manoel then asked about the young woman behind the disaster. The crime magistrate called Teresa a heroine, already thought dead when Simão reached Porto. The magistrate said she had defied death after hearing of the likely reduction and was safe according to her doctor. The supposed sister claimed to know Teresa, glancing at her lover, and Manoel confirmed Teresa's beauty.
Leaving, the magistrate sent Domingos an embrace through Manoel and promised to write. Mourão sent Rita Preciosa another embrace, but outside told his colleague that the woman was not Manoel's sister. Mourão recalled the flight with a married woman; offended at greeting a concubine, the austere magistrate decided to investigate. In the next post, the crime magistrate sent Domingos a mischievous letter. The crime magistrate said that he had met Manoel and a daughter of Domingos and had sent the father an embrace through the son. He added that he would send Domingos another embrace through the pretty young woman, if it were proper for an old man to teach her how a father is embraced.
Manoel was with his grandparents, while indulgent Rita Preciosa helped prepare a modest house for the Azorean woman. Domingos, still at Montezelos, refused to see his son and declared him a deserter from the sixth cavalry regiment. After receiving the crime magistrate's letter, Domingos ordered a secret inquiry into whether the woman was in Vila Real. Surveillance found her at the inn while Manoel prepared the new house. Domingos wrote to the local judge, who summoned the woman. She told her story sincerely through tears; the judge was moved and informed Domingos. Domingos stayed with the judge in Vila Real, where the Azorean woman was summoned again. Meanwhile, the provincial general prepared an order for Manoel's arrest as a cadet who had deserted the Bragança cavalry.
Expecting the judge, she found an ugly, grim and threatening man. Domingos introduced himself as Manoel's father and called his son the wrongdoer and the woman his victim. He also condemned her adultery: her punishment began when conscience called her act shameful, or would begin when it did. Trembling, she replied that she came from Faial and had a mother and sisters. Domingos asked whether her mother would shelter her; she believed she would. Domingos said Manoel was a deserter, perhaps already arrested or hiding; she knew nothing of this. He said she had no protector, while the woman sobbed in anguish. He asked why she did not return to her mother; she admitted having no money. He offered her immediate departure in a litter, with a maid accompanying her to Porto. In Porto, she would give a letter to whoever arranged her Lisbon passage. In Lisbon, another person would take her to the first ship for the Azores. She accepted, saying she had never expected such charity.
Hours later, the student's wife began her journey. An imagined sentimental reader interrupts, supposing that the husband died of passion and shame. The narrator says no: the student remained at university. Satirically, he credits death from shame to Garrett's Frei Luís de Sousa and death from passion to angry lovers' letters. He joked that modern husbands had Greco-Roman philosophy: ancient philosophers gave wives to friends or let friends take them. In fact, the husband neither died nor declined nor showed serious concern, and continued his medical studies.
More broken than her husband, she entered the litter in tears and delivered Domingos's letter to the crime magistrate in Porto. In his letter, Domingos mocked the false identity: the magistrate had revealed a daughter he had never known or recognised. He ordered them to send her through Lisbon on the first ship to her mother in Faial and forward the bills. With dark irony, he observed that Manoel had at least killed nobody to become a lover. He asked the crime magistrate to obtain the general's pardon for Manoel, a deserter from the sixth cavalry regiment hidden at a relative's home. Domingos thought Simão's temporary exile unavoidable and regarded even saving him from the gallows as a great feat. The letter said powerful Lisbon interests opposed Simão and Domingos had lost the police intendant's favour after leaving office.
The woman reached Faial through Lisbon; her mother had thought her dead and gave her calm, disillusioned, though unhappy years. Through the crime magistrate's influence, Manoel obtained a pardon and transferred to a regiment in Lisbon. After Domingos's death, Manoel left the army and returned to the province, ending the digression.