The red hearth-fire was no more in his fancy.

The hunger for domesticity had gone, and the girl was now less the wife he had desired than the dream of love he had vainly followed.
As he came back across the moors, for the first time for weeks his jealous love left him at peace.

His had been a fanciful Sylvia, "holy, fair, and wise"; and what if mortal Sylvia were unkind, there was yet comfort in this elusive lady of his memories.
He found George at the end of a second breakfast, a very ruddy, happy young man hunting high and low for a lost tobacco-jar.
"Oh, first-class," he said in answer to Lewis's question.

"Out and out the best day's shooting I've had in my life.

You were an ass not to come, you know.