This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy or rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody and yet in another sense we knew nothing at all about them. This is I believe a state of things only possible with English people of whom till today when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England and certainly I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.