eight o'clock
Sometimes as many as two people in a week bought railroad tickets ; sometimes a month would pass without anybody either sending or receiving a telegram . Telephone calls were a little more frequent . So the girl had little to do there at her sunny open window , where mignonette and heliotrope and nasturtiums bloomed in pots , and the big bumble bees came buzzing and plundering the little window garden . And , except on Sundays , Marque had little leisure to observe her , although in the long late June evenings it was still light at eight o'clock , and he had , without understanding how or why , formed the habit of coming down to the deserted station platform to smoke his pipe and sometimes to fish in the shallow waters of Willow Brook , and watch the ripples turn from gold to purple , and listen to a certain bird that sat singing every day at sunset on the tip of a fir-balsam across the stream -- a black and white bird with a rosy pink chest . So lovely the evening song of this bird that Marque , often watching the girl askance , wondered that the surprising beauty of the melody never caused her to lift her head from book or sewing , or even rise from the table and come out to the doorway to listen . But she never did ; and whether or not the bird 's singing appealed to her , he could not determine . Nobody in the little gossiping hamlet of Caranay seemed to know more than her name ; he himself knew only a few people -- men who , like himself , worked on the Willett place with hoe and rake and spraying cart and barrow -- comrades of roller and mower and weed-fork and mole-trap -- dull-witted cullers of dandelion and rose-beetle .