He raised his face to the sky and let the sun penetrate his skin. How was it possible for a man to not even realise he is lost until he is face to face with his salvation? He stared at the stream of cabs going in the opposite direction, the line of horses tossing their heads in the sunlight, the drivers with their coats folded beside them and their hats pushed back, and he remembered that day.

An afternoon in early February, a Friday, the midpoint in a summer like any other yet like no other summer before it, when the sun dazzled the eyes, it pricked the skin, it turned the grass in Hyde Park a burnished yellow. It brought tiny basking lizards out onto the pavements of Hunter Street and College Street.

Parliament was closed and all the premiers were in Melbourne for the extraordinary meeting of the constitutional convention in a last-ditch attempt to break the Federation deadlock. The meeting had concluded the evening before and Alasdair had travelled by cab at dawn to Sydney Terminal to meet the Premier off the overnight express. On the platform, Mr Reid, who was not a man to disappoint a crowd, announced to the waiting newspapermen that Mr Braddon’s amendments had been accepted, that the new constitution might, now, be agreeable to the people of New South Wales. The clamour of supporters and well-wishers at the station was so great it had been all Alasdair could do to shake the Premier’s hand and climb with him into a waiting carriage.

And thus was the unbreakable stalemate broken, the possibility of a second referendum made real. It was a great day.

It was about to get even greater.

Alasdair accompanied the Premier to Macquarie Street then made at once for his office at Richmond Terrace where he saw, with his own eyes, the torpor that had descended over parliament since the referendum defeat seven months earlier lifted, saw men hurry from building to building and from chamber to chamber attending briefings and calling meetings and drafting documents and his own sense of purpose, a purpose that had gradually leaked out of him as the dream of Federation had faded, was renewed. All morning he attended briefings, he called meetings, he drafted documents. In the afternoon he took a cab from Macquarie Street to Circular Quay.

And there he met Verity Trent.