Bracken suppressed all his impulses, postponed their sailing reservations, and wrote again to Dinah to explain one more delay. He had to write to Partridge too. As soon as he had returned to New York he communicated with Partridge to inquire the status of his suit for divorce, and had already received a most unsatisfactory reply. The mousy, smooth-shaven man who had accompanied Bracken to Cannes had gone on with his investigations, aided by a photograph of Lisl, and had finally caught up with her at Biarritz. She was living at an hotel there as the travelling companion and amie, not of Hutchinson but of a South American named Serrano—which, wrote Partridge philosophically, was a distinction without a difference and would have served their purpose just as well. But Partridge went on to say that it was no good serving the papers until Bracken had established something like a permanent residence in England. And as the date of his return had appeared to be indefinitely delayed by the state of affairs in Cuba, Partridge had not seen fit to keep Lisl under observation at Bracken’s expense during all those intervening months.
