But two days later, in the afternoon, Katharine Howard came upon her mistress with her jaws moving voraciously. Half of the cinnamon cates were eaten from the box on the writing-pulpit. A convulsion of rage passed over the girl's dark figure; her eyes dilated and appeared to blaze with a hot and threatening fury.
'If I could have thy head, before God I would shorten thee by the neck!' she said. 'Stay now; go not. Take thy hand from the door-latch.'
Sudden sobs shook her, and tears dropped down her furrowed and pallid cheeks. She was tormented always by a gnawing and terrible hunger that no meat and no bread might satisfy, so that, being alone with the cates in the cold spring afternoon, she had, in spite of the donor, been forced always nearer and nearer to them.
'God help me!' she said at last. 'Udal is gone, and the scullion that supplied me in secret has the small-pox. How may I get me things to eat?'
'To have stayed to ask me!' Katharine cried. 'What a folly was here!' For, as a daughter of the King, the Lady Mary was little more than herself; but because she was daughter to a queen that was at once a saint and martyr, Katharine was ready to spend her life in her service.
'I would stay to ask a service of any man or woman,' Mary answered, 'save only that I have this great hunger.' She clutched angrily at her skirt, and so calmed herself.
'How may you help me?' she asked grimly. 'There are many that would put poison in my food. My mother was poisoned.'
'I would eat myself of all the food that I bring you,' said Katharine.
'And if thou wast poisoned, I must get me another, and yet another after that. You know who it is that would have me away.'
At that hint of the presence of Cromwell, Katharine grew more serious.