He waited for her--motionless.

The stillness of the twilight rested on the valley now. Only from the
trees came the plaintive twittering of birds which had come in from
frozen weeds and fence-rows and at the thresholds of the boughs were
calling to one another. It was not their song, but their speech; there
was no love in it, but there was what for them perhaps corresponds to
our sense of ties. It most resembled in human life the brief things
that two people, having long lived together, utter to each other when
together in a room they prepare for the night: there is no
anticipation; it is a confession of the unconfessed. About him now
sounded this low winter music from the far boundary of other lives.

He did not hear it.

The light on the landscape had changed. The sun was setting and a
splendor began to spread along the sky and across the land. It laid a
glory on the roof of the house on the hill; it smote the edge of the
woodland pasture, burnishing with copper the gray domes; it shone
faintly on distant corn shocks, on the weather-dark tents of the hemp
at bivouac soldierly and grim. At his feet it sparkled in rose gleams
on the samite of the brook and threw burning shafts into the gloom of
the fir beside him.

He did not see it.

He did not hear the calling of the birds about his ears, he did not
see the sunset before his eyes, he did not feel the fir tree the
boughs of which stuck against his side.