Explore "Agatha's Husband" by Dinah Mulock on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Every one knows that story, perhaps the most terrible of its kind for many years -- and Heaven grant! for many more to come -- when a noble ship, with her full complement of human beings, fought at once with winds, and waves, and fire, until came down upon it, and upon all the homes which that one hour desolated, the certain doom. One shudders even at writing of such things, save that they must of necessity happen, and not rarely. But for one such tale as that of the _Amazon_, which convulses a whole kingdom with horror, there must be many unknown chronicles of equal dread, save that the little vessel sinks unnoticed into its sea grave, and the destruction carried with it passes not beyond its own immediate sphere. Such was the case with the Ardente.
When the train neared Southampton it was already bright morning. Everybody was moving about on the solid, safe, sunshiny earth -- nobody thought of shipwrecks and disasters at sea. Many a one looked lazily at the glittering Southampton-water; no one dreamed how, far beyond the curving line of horizon, human beings -- husbands and brothers -- might be floating about without food or water, frozen, thirsting, dying or dead, under the same sunny sky.