Alasdair looked annoyed. Or preoccupied. She tried to catch his eye but he avoided her, frowning at his brandy glass, glowering at the coffee the maid was now pouring into his cup. He was wearing a new silk tie, grey with black stripes, and a tiepin with a small diamond at the head. It was not quite in the right place, his tiepin; it was slightly off centre.

The gold tiepin with the engraved initials that she had taken from Miss Trent’s room was in her reticule. It nestled in a compartment of the little bag on her lap and, as she thought of it, it seemed to grow in size and then to diminish. She wondered why she had taken it, why she had not left it in that bedroom to be found by him the next time he was there.

But perhaps there would not be a next time?

And now here they were at dinner and the discussion around the table had moved, inexplicably, to art and literature.

‘Surely it is about time’, Alasdair was saying, leaning forward in his chair and unaccountably animated, ‘that one of our own men produced a work of literature worthy of the great works of Mr Dickens and Mr Hardy, of Mr Trollope and Mr Thackeray?’

And Eleanor was astonished. Alasdair had never spoken of literature before. He had never expressed a preference for this author over that, had never admitted to an admiration for the literary classics, yet here he was exhorting his fellow New South Welshmen to produce a work of fiction worthy of Dickens, of Hardy.

‘Oh, but Mr Dunlevy, we have the Bush Poets, do we not? Mr Lawson and Mr Paterson and others,’ replied Cecily Pyke, moved to utter the first words she had spoken all evening that did not concern her daughters, of whom she had a quantity. And then, perhaps regretting her outburst, she looked to her husband for confirmation.

‘Oh, certainly,’ agreed Fraser Pyke, who, as well as being a member of the Assembly, was also a pastoralist and an occasional Methodist lay preacher and who surely had no more idea of who Lawson or Paterson were than he had the members of the Imperial Russian court. He looked pleasantly bewildered by this turn in the conversation. He had previously been discussing the Premier’s Tour of the North which, one gathered, had been a great success and from whence Henry Rothe—in his London-made clothes and the largest mansion on the point—was that afternoon returned. Why did Alasdair not get invited on these trips with the Premier, Eleanor wondered—but only for a moment. Her husband’s career was in many ways a mystery to her, and it seemed to her that one of them, or perhaps both, had deliberately cultivated it to be so.