Rina looked at the pale and shaken Garth with an odd expression. "If you have whiskey, better tak' a drink," she suggested.
Garth had his flask; and he obeyed without question.
Throughout the operation, Rina had preserved an admirable, professional air, intent and impersonal; and when necessary she had brusquely ordered Garth to help her. Now that it was all over her face altered; she continued to kneel at Natalie's side, gazing at her soft hair, and the whiteness of her skin with a kind of sad and jealous wonder.
Garth on the alert at the change, which portended he knew not what explosion of passion in the savage woman's breast, ordered her from Natalie's side. She obeyed, resuming her sullen mask, but lingered near him, plainly full of some question she desired to ask. He observed for the first, a purpling bruise above her temple. Rina saw his eyes upon it, and her colour changed.
"I run against a tree," she hastily volunteered.
At the same time her hand stole to her throat to hide certain marks on its dusky roundness. Garth knew instinctively that she was loyally lying. Mabyn had beaten her. He wondered how far the wish to serve the woman she had injured was Rina's own impulse and how far she had been forced to it by Mabyn. He began dimly to conceive that the red woman had good qualities.
At last the question on her breast was spoken. "Who is she?" she asked, pointing sullenly at the sleeping Natalie.
Garth rapidly considered what he should answer. He could not pretend to himself that he had forgiven the woman; but since Natalie's pain was mitigated he was cooler; and his sense of justice forced it home on him that Rina, too, had been through her ordeal. In his present desperate situation, his only chance of assistance lay in her—Mabyn was an egomaniac, and utterly irresponsible. Frankness had served Garth in good stead before this; and finally he told her the plain truth in such terms that she could understand.
"This feeling Mabyn has for her," he insisted in the end, "is only a passing one. If we can get her out of his sight all will go on as before."
Rina nodded. Her inscrutable face softened a little, he thought. "I on'erstan' now," she said quietly. "So I not go crazy wit' t'inking about it."