He was very kind to her, unfailingly considerate in his treatment of her, but by some means he made her aware that his orders were to be respected.

The Kaffir servants were swift to do his bidding, though she did not find them so eager to fulfil their duties when he was not at hand.
She laughingly commented upon this one day to Burke, and he amazed her by pointing to the riding-whip she chanced to be holding at the time.
"You'll find that's the only medicine for that kind of thing," he said.

"Give 'em a taste of that and they'll respect you!" She decided he must be joking, but only a few days later he quite undeceived her on that point by dragging Joe, the house boy, into the yard and chastising him with a _sjambok_ for some neglected duty.
Joe howled lustily, and Sylvia yearned to fly to the rescue, but there was something so judicial about Burke's administration of punishment that she did not venture to intervene.
When he came in a little later, she was sitting in their living-room nervously stitching at the sleeve of a shirt that he had managed to tear on some barbed wire.

He had his pipe in his hand, and there was an air of grim satisfaction about him that seemed to denote a consciousness of something well done.
Sylvia set her mouth hard and stitched rapidly, trying to forget Joe's piercing yells of a few minutes before.

Burke went to the window and stood there, pensively filling his pipe.
Suddenly, as if something in her silence struck him, he turned and looked at her.