Nun’ Alvarez, thus reminded of “men with letters,” fell into so great a passion and fever that he was like to die. He refused to eat, and it was only after much coaxing that he was persuaded to sit down at table. They brought him water for his hands and roast birds to eat. His daughter began to carve them before him, and his mother fanned him with a fan; but he refused to eat, telling his mother that “that bloated churl with his Setubal has been the death of me.” His secretary, Gil Airaz, would have excused the offender, but Nun’ Alvarez turned on him in a rage: “The fellow, for what he said, deserved a score of blows, and if you cared for me or my health you would have given him them.” Gil Airaz said that there was still time, if that was his pleasure, and the Constable answered that such a pleasure would seem to him all too long in coming. So the secretary, in his presence, took a stick and went out. When he came back and told him how he had beaten and kicked and covered with mud and water the citizen of Setubal, Nun’ Alvarez seemed to recover instantly and began to eat and drink. To any other man, lord of half Portugal, it might perhaps have seemed a little thing to have had a citizen beaten and rolled in a ditch, but presently Nun’ Alvarez stopped eating, his eyes filled with tears, and he began to wish he was dead. “Do you not see, Gil Airaz,” he said, “that it would have been better for me to die than that you should have done what you did to that good man?” “Now would to God I had no part of all that land that God and my Lord the King have given me, so that this thing were undone!” When Gil Airaz saw that he was in earnest he told him how he had only made a pretence of having beaten the man of Setubal and how all the citizens had gone contentedly home. Nun’ Alvarez was so overjoyed at this that he rose straightway from the table and went out to the orchard and flowing streams. In three months, with the help of the King’s physicians, he was well, and going alone with a page he set to cutting the brushwood in front of him, and found his strength had returned. There is something infinitely touching in this story about a man who was usually so calm and restrained that he might be in a passion of anger and only show it--to those who knew him--by his smile, and whose whole life was marked by exceptional strength of will. But his old vigour returned, and very soon he was challenging the Master of Santiago, begging him not to tire himself in advancing through so hot a country, as he, “Nun’ Alvarez Pereira, Count of Barcellos and of Ourem and of Arrayolos and Constable of my Lord the King of Portugal,” would save him the trouble.