A garland lost in the crowd
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E dito isto lá se forão ellas com os braços enlaçados, formando como longa grinalda de variegadas flores, que lá se foi serpeando perder-se entre a multidão.
And with that they went off, arms entwined, forming like a long garland of many-coloured flowers, which went winding away to lose itself in the crowd.
The chapter closes on a single, beautiful, faintly sinister image: the ladies drift off 'com os braços enlaçados', arms linked, 'como longa grinalda de variegadas flores' — like a long garland of many-coloured flowers, winding away 'serpeando', snaking, to be lost in the crowd. The garland is lovely; the verb 'serpear', to move like a serpent, slips a coil of menace under the loveliness, and the whole procession of envy vanishes into the throng from which any danger to Isaura will come. Guimarády ends where he began, on the swirling 'multidão', the crowd, into which the fugitive has now been drawn and displayed. The last motion of the chapter is dispersal — the gossips scatter, carrying away their memory of the beauty-mark, seeding the crowd with the very detail that can undo her. The scene of triumph and the seed of catastrophe close on the same soft, winding image, and the reader is left with the beauty-spot glowing in the mind, waiting.
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