A Fisher Girl of France by Fernand Calmettes

To-morrow at daybreak they will go aboard together, Elise Hénin and her little brother Firmin. They have put on their Sunday clothes to say farewell to their mother, who sleeps on the slope of the dune in a corner of the old graveyard. Nine years has the poor woman lain there in the peace of her last sleep -- deaf forever to the noise of the tempests which roused her so often, of old, to the vigil of anxious nights.

She went from the cares of life a long time before her husband. He was swallowed up by the sea, which never gave back his body. One night, when the wind was not high -- one hardly knows how it came about -- he was caught in a fatal current and was lost, with his boat and six companions, in the wild eddies of the most dangerous shoal on that coast. In some shelter for shipwrecked sailors, beneath the wave, he is waiting for a day, perhaps not distant, when a mighty tempest shall stir the depths and, opening his prison of sand, return his body to earth again.