But Alasdair had sat in the cab, Greensmith seated beside him brushing droplets of water from his coat, and felt the mood of the meeting slip away. Could they do it a second time? he wondered. A year ago victory had been assured, and the great and noble work of fashioning the new Federation, the first session of the new federal parliament in Melbourne and himself taking his place in that new parliament, had been so clear, so vivid. It had carried him day after day, week after week, from council chamber to town hall across the colony.

And then they had failed. The expected majority had not materialised. The men of the colony had proved intransigent, intractable, narrow of mind and lacking in imagination. They had proved themselves incapable of grasping a reasoned argument and too easily swayed by base fears that had no foundation in logic. They had shown themselves to be stupid.

So here they were a year later doing it all again, but somehow the glory of it was gone. Did he no longer believe in it? he wondered. Was it possible he had allowed himself to become distracted?

And he thought: I appear outwardly to be the same man I was a year ago, but I am not the same man. Not the same man at all. And the thought filled him with wonder.

And now he was arriving late for the Premier’s reception. Yet he stood in the doorway and did not enter. A footman hurried past carrying a tray of wineglasses, another passed going the other way, and in the centre of the room the Secretary for Mines and Agriculture was laughing. They were serving the rather inferior colonial wine, he saw, that came direct from this same minister’s own vineyards near Mudgee and for which the minister was the sole supplier to parliament at a premium price. It was little wonder the minister was laughing.

He saw Eleanor on the far side of the room standing beneath the rather disapproving portrait of Frederick Goulburn and surrounded by a little cluster of ministers. It had not occurred to him she would be here; he had forgotten she had said she would attend. She was all in white and she wore her diamonds. They sparkled at her throat and along her arms and wrists. Her face was very pale and quite without expression, and she turned from one gentleman to the other yet appeared barely aware of any of them, indeed just as though she was not really there at all, and for a moment Alasdair could not catch his breath for his wife seemed the most beautiful, the most unobtainable thing in the room.

It had been a very long time since he had looked on her as a stranger might. And even now the illusion of her beauty, her aloofness, was fading, replaced by half a lifetime of married co-existence.