Camilla's letter compares a wife without her husband to an army without its general and a castle without its castellan, and says the protector he left has more regard to his own pleasure than to what concerns him. If Anselmo does not return quickly she will go to her parents, even if she leaves his house without a guardian. Anselmo reads it as proof the test is working and orders her not to leave. She regrets writing, fears he will think Lothario saw some lightness in her, and still decides to remain rather than feed servants' gossip. Lothario presses the siege with tears, promises, and praise of her beauty, and she falls. Leonela alone knows. He does not tell Camilla that Anselmo arranged the opportunity, lest she think the love was accidental and undervalue it.
When the husband returns, Lothario lies beautifully: words borne away on the wind, money untouched, Camilla the treasure-house of purity. He tells Anselmo to take back the crowns, refrain from further proof, and reckon himself safe in port. Anselmo believes him as an oracle and still wants more sport, if only verses to Chloris so he may pretend Lothario loves another. At table Lothario recites two sonnets to the woman in front of him while the husband praises the cruel lady who will not hear, adding link after link to the chain of his own dishonour, taking every deepening of the affair for a rise in virtue. Camilla, forewarned that she is Chloris, asks for more.
Leonela, seeing her mistress's weakness, recites a lover's alphabet and admits she too has a young man of good birth. Soon she introduces him into the house, sure Camilla will not dare expose him. Mistresses who fall become slaves of their maids. Camilla catches the visitor more than once and only helps hide him. One dawn Lothario sees him muffling his face and, forgetting Leonela exists, takes him for a rival. Jealousy, which does not reason, sends him to Anselmo before the household is up. He says Camilla's fortress has surrendered, that she has promised an interview in the jewel closet, and that the husband should pretend to leave for two or three days and hide among the tapestries to see with his own eyes, then punish in silence if the sin is real. Anselmo, who thought the trial already won, agrees. Lothario repents as soon as he is alone, curses his want of sense, and goes to confess the trap. Camilla is already in tears about Leonela's gallant. Once he believes her, they turn the performance against both men.
She summons Lothario before the hidden husband, draws a dagger line on the floor he must not cross, and asks when she ever answered his prayers with hope, when she ever took his gifts. To give the farce a colour of truth she stabs herself high on the left side near the shoulder, a wound too slight to kill and bloody enough to convince. Leonela weeps, calls for a confessor, washes the cut with wine, and talks as if her lady were a model of purity who lacks the spirit to finish the sacrifice. Lothario laments over the body so that a listener would pity him more than her, then, alone, crosses himself at the adroitness of it. Anselmo watches what he takes for Portia-level virtue, escapes to embrace his friend, and comes home leading by the hand the man who has destroyed his good name. Camilla receives him with an averted face and smiles in her heart. For some months the hoodwink holds. Then, the teller says, Fortune turns her wheel, the guilt is published, and Anselmo pays with his life for the curiosity that hired this performance.
