In Chapter 17, Jake finds Bill, Mike and Edna outside of a bar, where Mike and Bill are very drunk and have been thrown out for fighting. Jake and Edna convince them to leave, and they go to a café where they are son joined by Robert, who angrily demands to know where Brett is. Jake refuses to tell Robert, while Mike drunkenly goads him by saying that Brett has gone off with Pedro. This enrages Robert, who calls Jake a pimp and hits him several times, knocking him unconscious. When Jake comes to he hears that Robert knocked Mike down as well.

     Feeling dizzy and disoriented, Jake insists on going back to the hotel. When he arrives he finds Bill, who disappeared sometime before the fight with Robert. Bill tells Jake that Robert is in his room and asking to see him. Jake goes to Robert's room to find him lying on his bed crying, and he apologizes, saying he couldn't stand to see Brett treat him like a stranger after they spent a vacation together. Robert tells Jake he'll be leaving in the morning. After trying unsuccessfully to run a bath, Jake makes his way to his own room and goes to sleep.

     Jake awakes the next morning with a headache, but rushes out to see the running of the bulls, where he witnesses one man be severely gored by a bull. After the running, Jake goes to have a coffee, and is informed by one of the waiters that the gored man has died.

     When Jake returns to his room after his coffee, he is soon joined by Bill and Mike, who were at the ring to see the bulls enter, and describe seeing the bulls trample people, while others jumped into the ring willingly. Mike has beer brought up to the room, and he and Bill tell Jake more details about the previous night. After Robert knocked Jake out, he went to Pedro's room and beat him up, then tried to convince Brett to come away with him. After being further rejected by Brett, Robert broke down crying, and tried to apologize to Pedro, who continued getting up despite being badly beaten by Robert, and managed to hit Robert back a few times. Pedro told Robert he would kill him if he wasn't gone from town in the morning. Mike and Bill tell Jake that Brett is now taking care of Pedro, and Mike muses that Brett was once taking care of him, which is how they came to be together. Mike elaborates that Brett hasn't had an easy life, and her previous husband, Lord Ashley, refused to sleep in a bed, slept with a loaded revolver, and told her he would kill her.

     That afternoon, Jake, Bill and Mike sit at the café, and eventually Brett comes to join them. She tells them that Pedro is quite hurt, and that she left him sleeping to come and see them. Mike, who hasn't been to sleep since the night before, drunkenly asks Brett how Pedro is, and taunts her for having a Jew and now a bull fighter before he tips the table and causes a huge crash of broken glass and dishes. Annoyed with Mike, Brett asks Jake to take a walk with her. They stop in at a church to pray for Pedro to do well in his fights. When they return to the hotel, Brett goes back to Pedro's room and Jake goes to check on Mike, whose room is a mess of clothes strewn about and empty bottles. Mike is drunk in bed, and Jake gets him to go to sleep before leaving him. Jake and Bill go to eat lunch, and Brett joins them afterwards to head to the ring to watch the fights. When Pedro appears in the ring, his face looks terribly beaten, but he fights very well, and gifts Brett with the ear of the last bull he kills, the same bull that gored a man that morning. Pedro is carried out as a hero on the shoulders of the crowd.

     Returning to the hotel, Brett retires upstairs, and Jake and Bill sit together, with Jake feeling depressed and Bill encouraging him to drink to feel better. Jake ends up very drunk, and goes up to Brett's room where Mike is sitting with a bottle and tells him that Brett has left town with Pedro. Jake goes to his room to try and sleep, and eventually goes downstairs to join Mike and Bill for dinner.

     The final chapter opens the next morning, and the fiesta has ended. Jake, Bill, and Mike make plans to leave Pamplona. They decide to travel to Bayonne together, where Bill will catch a train to Paris and Jake will go to San Sebastian to spend another week of vacation. Once they part ways, Jake spends the night in Bayonne, enjoying being back in France, where he feels relationships are more straightforward. The next morning he takes the train to San Sebastian, and spends an idyllic day swimming and relaxing. On his second day in San Sebastian, Jake receives telegrams from Brett asking him to come to Madrid where she is in trouble. Jakes takes the overnight express train and once in Madrid goes straight to the hotel where Brett said she would be.

     When Jake finds Brett in her room, she tells him she realized she shouldn't be with Pedro, and made him leave. She also tells Jake that Pedro's friends were harassing him about her, and he asked her to grow her hair long in order to appear more womanly. Upset and crying, Brett says she is going back to Mike.

     Leaving the hotel, Jake and Brett go to another hotel and drink martinis as the bar, then have lunch elsewhere before taking a taxi around to see the city. The novel closes with Jake and Brett sitting together in the back of the taxi, and while Brett muses how good they could have been together, Jake finally seems resigned that this is a pretty, but impossible, dream.