Oberland by Dorothy M. Richardson — Read

Hurrying through her dressing to keep the appointment that had not been made and whose certainty in her own mind was challenged in vain by all the probabilities, she opened her door upon the silent corridor; stillness and silence as if everyone else in the hotel had been spirited away leaving clear, within the strange surroundings in which for a while she was set down, the familiar pathway of her life. And when she reached the dining-room the sight of them there, side by side at breakfast in the brilliant morning light with no one else in the room save herself approaching, had for a moment the hard unreality of things deliberately arranged. She saw them very clearly and it was as if neither of them were there; as if they were elsewhere each on his own path from which this tacit meeting was a digression.

But before she was halfway to the table they were rising. Their breakfast over, they were going off into their day. She was too late; her haste was justified of its wisdom. Reaching her place, she murmuring a casual greeting, turned away towards the spaces of her own day opening, beyond this already vanishing small disappointment, as brightly as the light shining in from the sunlit snow.