He had spent the day replying to correspondence, had spoken to a journalist from the Herald and another from the Mail and Advertiser. He had met delegations of town officials from Goulburn and Bathurst and Cooma, provincially clothed self-satisfied men, each convinced of their own importance, each convinced their town and their town alone should be made the federal capital. He had listened to their arguments, he had pointed out that the referendum had yet to happen, that there would be no federal capital at all if it did not pass.

‘Gentlemen, we are building a nation!’ he had said to the town officials and again to the journalist from the Herald, words he had spoken a hundred, two hundred times this twelve-month, but today the words had fallen from his mouth like a platitude, empty, devoid of meaning.

For Miss Trent was nowhere to be found.

He had gone to the house at Woolloomooloo on Saturday evening and had stood at her door and she had not answered. He had returned the following evening, though it was a Sunday, but the outcome had been the same. He had walked around the exterior of the house, looking up at the windows, some lighted, some in darkness, had waited for a time in the shadows, had started forward as a carriage appeared, as a figure had approached the house, as another had emerged from it. Had slunk back into the shadows at each fresh disappointment. He had left, finally, debased and shamed. And yet he would go there again this evening, though he and Eleanor were to attend a dinner first.

The dinner was at the house of Charles Booker-Reid, a man he despised, a dinner at which nothing of importance would be uttered and at which his presence would make no difference, and yet Booker-Reid wielded some influence still, had the ear of one or two prominent men. And so he would take Eleanor to dinner, though his heart strained within its cage so that he stood for a long time, unmoving, outside his house.

Eleanor opened the front door to him. He wondered if she had been watching for him. It irked him that she had done so—did they not have servants?

‘My dear, you look fatigued,’ she said, standing in the doorway to deliver this charge. ‘How went your meeting? Come inside, the fire is lit in the drawing room. Let Alice bring you some refreshment.’

And at last she stood aside to let him enter.