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Marta returned with Dona Teresa several days later. Feliciano agreed that his wife should receive treatment with water. The compassionate vicar's sister offered to care for the poor woman. Marta clung to Teresa, overcome by a fear that the narrator describes in the cruel language of the period. She begged Teresa not to leave her and to protect her from the missioner.
Dona Teresa later attended the birth of Marta's first daughter and became her godmother. She imagined that love for the child would bring about a gentle change in the mother's mind. She hoped the daughter would divert Marta from her longing for José Alves. The medicine of that period, however, did not expect such a transformation. Alienist treatises claimed that an injured brain could not be restored by maternal love. According to them, such love acted only in bodies they considered normal. Teresa could not believe that Marta had permanently lost her reason. In the rare conversations that engaged her, Marta spoke confusedly and claimed to see José Alves's soul as though reporting an ordinary event.
When they showed her the newborn baby, Marta gazed at her for several seconds. She spoke no affectionate word and showed no joy. Teresa spoke tenderly to her about the little girl, trying to awaken her heart. She placed the child in Marta's arms and offered her the baby to kiss. Marta yielded sadly and reluctantly, kissing her daughter as though she were someone else's child. The wet nurse told the servants that the woman they called “the brasileira” was a “cafra” and could not bear the little angel from Heaven.
Marta's attacks became less frequent. During the three days before each attack, however, her disturbance appeared in unusual behaviour and delirium. She shut herself in her bedroom with many pots of flowers, arranging them on the floor like a garden path. Once she explained to Teresa, her daughter's godmother, that José Alves had promised her a garden in Vilalva when they married. She had therefore prepared that path of roses so that they could walk together when he came at night. Teresa looked at her with deep pity and became convinced that Marta was then lost to ordinary life.
When Marta shut herself in her bedroom, Feliciano already knew that another attack was approaching. He slept in another bed, claiming that he needed rest and had to rise early to supervise the labourers. Regret over the marriage was already tormenting him. He escaped the troubles that had no solution, caring only for his own comfort. He even thought that becoming the widower of such an ill wife would not be very unpleasant. After the attacks, Marta returned to a calm and passive indifference. Her uncle would then return to her bed, thinking of his comfort and the demands of his own body. Thus Marta bore her husband five children in seven years, without the births amounting to consent or a cure. The doctor had explained to Osório, according to the science of the period, that Marta's mental condition did not prevent reproduction. The narrator closes the passage with the cruel irony that Providence had not made women considered insane sterile.
During the three days before the attacks, Marta seemed to feel repelled by her husband. José Alves then came alive again for her, rose from the grave and carried her on angel's wings to the paradise of Prazins. Dona Teresa pressed her ear to the keyhole and heard Marta speaking as though she were holding a dialogue. She heard a question, a long silence and then an answer. Marta would then creep to the door to make sure nobody was listening. She spoke confused, affectionate words, as though her lips were touching a beloved face. José's name emerged clearly and joyfully, with an almost childlike tenderness. At times she gave a desperate cry, as though he were breaking free of her arms to escape. A spiritualist of Kardec's school might have used that vision as an argument for visible manifestations. According to that hypothesis, the fluid or perispirit would take a semi-material form, almost tangible to the medium.
Feliciano knew nothing of those scenes. By the sixth year of marriage, he had armoured himself in the impenetrable selfishness of a miser. He cut expenses severely, although his great fortune made such economies look mean. The medicine of the period even considered him a lunatic, infected by his wife's condition. The narrator asks ironically whether madness might be merely an exaggeration of character. Local people called him mad because they saw him crossing his pine woods in a monocle, gesturing and talking to himself. Yet the narrator rejects that popular theory as ignorant. Feliciano made calculations aloud, as old poets declaimed verse outdoors in the moonlight. What was certain was that nobody could cheat him of even one vintém. One after another, he bought every estate that had belonged to Vasco Cerveira Lobo of Quadros. He acquired some from the widow and others from the children. Dona Honorata Guião, by then remarried to the overseas magistrate Adolfo da Silveira, returned to mainland Portugal. She intended to claim half of the lieutenant-colonel's unentailed estate. Egas and Heitor learnt that their mother was at Pombais with her husband and children. They tried to drive her out with threats and insults, and fired shots at the window. The magistrate fled with his family and later attended the legal proceedings under armed protection. In the end, Honorata sold her share far below its value to Feliciano Prazins, the returnee from Brazil. The Morgado and his brother sold the unentailed property and squandered the rest of their lives gambling in taverns. The daughters escaped the wreck by clinging to the planks of their dowries. They easily found husbands who freed their property from debt but kicked them when they remembered the engineers of the Count of Clarange Lucote.
In the narrative present, the brasileira of Prazins is fifty-three years old. Her thirty-year-old neighbours have never seen her, for she has not left her bedroom since Dona Teresa died in 1848. Nobody listens to her now, but she repeats the words of her love from forty years before and asks for flowers. She continues to have the same visions and, in the intervals, still weeps when she understands that José Dias is dead. Father Osório visits her during those moments of uncertain reason. He speaks to her of Teresa so that he may feel the bitter sweetness of sharing his tears. The priest says that he has never been able to see a clear boundary between Marta's reason and insanity. After the delirium, she falls into the state that the text calls hypochondriacal monomania. Her soul then seems to sleep without dreams or visions. During that second state of stupor, only Osório is admitted to her room. Before entering, he waits for Marta to leave the bed or cover the soiled bodice of her dress with a shawl. The narrator sees in that shawl a persistent spark of feminine modesty. The generalisation that follows about insane and hysterical women likewise belongs to the period's cruel voice.
Marta has two married daughters who are already mothers. At certain times they calmly put on their Sunday clothes and return to their parents' house. There they resume their unmarried work in the barren fields, barefoot and with hoes in their hands. They work cheerfully and sing fresh songs at the top of their voices. Their husbands, to whom the narrator ironically attributes great good sense, no longer come to fetch them. When the women return, their husbands receive them without questions because any distress brings them dizziness and tears. The other children are described by the narrator in that century's harsh medical terms: weak, sickly and without a childhood. In that language, intellectual disability and a lack of moral sense predominated among them. One of those sons studied for the priesthood and was thought to be the most capable. Feliciano believed that he was talented. The boy studied Latin for six years in Braga, subjected to violent discipline that took no account of his limitations. After three failures, the teacher persuaded Feliciano to send him home. The student brought home more than five thousand communion wafers in a tin box, saved for the future priestly consecrations he had imagined. His father still managed to sell them at a loss of only ten per cent.
Three months before the end of the narrative, Father Osório pointed Feliciano out to the narrator in Famalicão market. “There is Feliciano Prazins, the returnee from Brazil, if you have never seen him,” said the vicar of Caldelas. He was a very thin, clean-shaven old man, standing upright with his monocle fixed before his eye. He wore drill clothes and a dirty dust coat, torn beside the buttons. With a quince switch, he brushed the dust from his rolled-up trousers. Osório said that Feliciano was eighty-four and had walked from his home, a league and a half away. At dinner he spent one vintém on rice and another on wine. He owned five hundred million réis and walked home through, or close to, his fourteen estates. According to Osório, frugality, exercise and sordid selfishness would keep the old man alive for a long time yet. He quoted Alexandre Dumas: selfish people and parrots would live for a hundred and fifty years.