But they waited in vain for her coming, she was not well enough to attend the service. From that day her body grew weaker and weaker. She felt that death was approaching, and grimly she welcomed the approach of death. With a kind of fierce disdain she refused all food, and she refused to leave the chair in which she sat waiting. Night and day in silence she sat staring in front of her, face to face with death. Music was played to her in the hope that it might dispel the black gloom which had settled upon her. She did not hear the music. She sat motionless in her chair staring in front of her, greater than Cleopatra, but without the solace of the asp's quick kiss. Her eyes had no expression in them now. Her waiting-women were terrified. Cecil came to her and told her "to content the people she _must_ go to bed." Then she spoke, saying that "_must_ was not a word fit to be used to princes;" she dismissed Cecil from her presence, and as he went away she spoke again. "Little man, little man," she said, "if your father had lived ye durst not have said so much, but ye know I must die, and that makes ye so presumptuous." Lord Admiral Howard, Earl of Nottingham, remained with her. At last she spoke to him. "My lord, I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck." He bade her have courage, but she answered in a low voice, "I am tied, I am tied, and the case is altered with me." Her waiting women were terrified. The powers of darkness seemed at play in the Palace at Richmond. Lady Southwell affirms that the queen of hearts was nailed under the Queen's chair, the nail through the forehead; "they durst not pull it out remembering that the like thing was used to the old Countess of Sussex and afterwards proved a witchcraft for which certain persons were hanged as instruments of the same." Lady Guildford left the Queen, as she thought, sleeping, but saw her walking from one room to another; she hurried back, and there she found the Queen still, as she thought, sleeping. Lady Guildford swore that it must have been the Queen's ghost which she had seen, while the Queen was yet living. At length, after this long vigil of four days and four nights staring in the face of death, she was constrained to lie down in her bed. But the tired old woman might not die in peace; while she breathed she was Queen of England.