She was the prettiest and the youngest girl in the sanatorium.
She was in point of fact not so young as Ashenden had first thought her, she was twenty-nine, but for the last eight years she had been wandering from one sanatorium to another, in Switzerland, England and Scotland, and the sheltered invalid life had preserved her youthful appearance so that you might easily have taken her for twenty.
All she knew of the world she had learnt in these establishments, so that she combined rather curiously extreme innocence with extreme sophistication.
She had seen a number of love affairs run their course.
A good many men, of various nationalities, had made love to her; she accepted their attentions with self-possession and humour, but she had at her disposal plenty of firmness when they showed an inclination to go too far.
She had a force of character unexpected in anyone who looked so flower-like and when it came to a show-down knew how to express her meaning in plain, cool and decisive words.
She was quite ready to have a flirtation with George Templeton.
It was a game she understood, and though always charming to him, it was with a bantering lightness that showed quite clearly that she had summed him up and had no mind to take the affair more seriously than he did.
Like Ashenden, Templeton went to bed every evening at six and dined in his room, so that he saw Ivy only by day.
They went for little walks together, but otherwise were seldom alone.
At lunch the conversation between the four of them, Ivy, Templeton, Henry Chester and Ashenden, was general, but it was obvious that it was for neither of the two men that Templeton took so much trouble to be entertaining.
It seemed to Ashenden that he was ceasing to flirt with Ivy to pass the time, and that his feelings for her were growing deeper and more sincere; but he could not tell whether she was conscious of it nor whether it meant anything to her.
Whenever Templeton hazarded a remark that was more intimate than the occasion warranted she countered it with an ironic one that made them all laugh.
But Templeton's laugh was rueful.
He was no longer content to have her take him as a play-boy.
The more Ashenden knew Ivy Bishop the more he liked her.
There was something pathetic in her sick beauty, with that lovely transparent skin, the thin face in which the eyes were so large and so wonderfully blue; and there was something pathetic in her plight, for like so many others in the sanatorium she seemed to be alone in the world.
Her mother led a busy social life, her sisters were married; they took but a perfunctory interest in the young woman from whom they had been separated now for eight years.
They corresponded, they came to see her occasionally, but there was no longer very much between them.
She accepted the situation without bitterness.
She was friendly with everyone and prepared always to listen with sympathy to the complaints and the distress of all and sundry.
She went out of her way to be nice to Henry Chester and did what she could to cheer him.
'Well, Mr Chester,' she said to him one day at lunch, 'it's the end of the month, your wife will be coming tomorrow.
That's something to look forward to.'
'No, she's not coming this month,' he said quietly, looking down at his plate.
'Oh, I am sorry.
Why not?
The children are all right, aren't they?'
'Dr Lennox thinks it's better for me that she shouldn't come.'
There was a silence.
Ivy looked at him with troubled eyes.
'That's touch luck, old man,' said Templeton in his hearty way.
'Why didn't you tell Lennox to go to hell?'
'He must know best,' said Chester.
Ivy gave him another look and began to talk of something else.
Looking back, Ashenden realized that she had at once suspected the truth.
For next day he happened to walk with Chester.
'I'm awfully sorry your wife isn't coming,' he said.
'You'll miss her visit dreadfully.'
'Dreadfully.'
He gave Ashenden a sidelong glance.
Ashenden felt that he had something he wanted to say, but could not bring himself to say it.
He gave his shoulders an angry shrug.
'It's my fault if she's not coming.
I asked Lennox to write and tell her not to.
I couldn't stick it any more.
I spend the whole month looking forward to her coming and then when she's here I hate her.
You see, I resent so awfully having this filthy disease.
She's strong and well and full of beans.
It maddens me when I see the pain in her eyes.