It would have been a monotonous and even dreary existence but for the fact that she rode with Burke almost every evening, and sometimes in the early morning also, and thus saw a good deal of the working of the farm.  Her keen interest in horses made a strong bond of sympathy between them.  She loved them all.  The mares and their foals were a perpetual joy to her, and she begged hard to be allowed to try her powers at breaking in some of the young animals.  Burke, however, would not hear of this.  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.  She felt his eyes upon her though she did not raise her own.

After a moment or two he came to her.  “What are you doing there?” he said.

It was the first piece of work she had done for him.  She glanced up.  “Mending your shirt,” she told him briefly.

He laid his hand abruptly upon it.  “What are you doing that for?  I don’t want you to mend my things.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Burke!” she said.  “You can’t go in tatters.  Please don’t hinder me!  I want to get it done.”

She spoke with a touch of sharpness, not feeling very kindly disposed towards him at the moment.  She was still somewhat agitated, and she wished with all her heart that he would go and leave her alone.

She almost said as much in the next, breath as he did not remove his hand.  “Why don’t you go and shoot something?  There’s plenty of time before supper.”