d, I asked the driver to make the detour. So at last I was
able to inform Briggs that we were passing Buckingham Palace: I turned
his head so that he looked straight towards that architectural
phenomenon. It was, of course, invisible to him. No matter. He wished to
be able to boast, to his wife, that he had seen (he used that verb) the
house where the King lived.

His wife--he married a month before he enlisted--had been notified of
his return; but I suggested that at St. Pancras we might telegraph to
her the actual hour of the train's arrival, in case she should desire to
meet it. The idea commended itself to Briggs: he had not thought of such
a thing: telegraphing had perhaps hardly come within his purview, at
least so I surmised when, the telegraph-form before me, I asked him what
he wished me to write. He began cheerily, as though dictating a letter
of gossip:--"_My dear wife_--" Economy necessitated a taboo of this
otherwise charming method of communication. "_Arriving Bradford
five-thirty, Tom_," was the result of final boilings-down, which took so
long that we nearly achieved the anticlimax of missing our train
altogether.

Now at Bradford (at the end of one of the chattiest five hours I ever
spent in my life) no Mrs. Briggs was perceptible. I kept my patient on
the platform until every other passenger had gone: I marched him up and
down the main area of the station. Each time I caught sight of a woman
who looked a possible Mrs. Briggs I steered my charge into her vicinity.
In spite of a piece of information which Briggs had imparted to me on
the journey--namely, that he expected soon to become a father--I was
surprised that his wife had not come to the station to welcome him.
However, it was plain that Briggs himself was not particularly
surprised, nor, what was more important, disappointed. Nothing could
damp his eternal placidity and good humour. He proposed that from this
point onward he should pursue his journey alone. "Nowt to do but git on
th' tram," he said. "It's a fair step from 'ere, but I knows every inch
of t' way." At all events (as of course I could not allow this) he would
now act as my guide. And he did. "First to the right.... Now we're goin'
by a big watchmaker's-and-jeweller's.... Now cross t' street.... Now on
th' corner over there by t' Sinnemer is w'ere we git our tram."

The tram in due course appeared, and we boarded it. "Tha mun pay
thrippence only, mind," he warned me when the conduct