Let us set sail north
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façamo-nos de véla para as provincias do norte, onde talvez primeiro que elle deparemos com a nossa fugitiva heroina.
let us set sail for the northern provinces, where perhaps we shall come upon our fugitive heroine before he does.
The narrator turns the reader into a fellow-traveller: 'façamo-nos de véla' — let us make sail — an old nautical idiom that literally raises the reader onto a ship bound north. Guimarães was writing serial-flavoured fiction, and this is its native gesture: the storyteller as tour-guide, steering us ahead of the villain to reach the heroine first. The phrase 'nossa fugitiva heroina' does two things at once — it names Isaura's new role, the runaway, and it enlists our sympathy openly by making her ours. The playful, buttonholing tone is a deliberate relief after the harrowing chapter behind us; the book lets the reader breathe before showing where Isaura has surfaced. And the promise 'primeiro que elle' — before Leôncio — sets the whole suspense of the coming chapters: a race between the reader's affection and the hunter's reach.
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