'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. 'I will save of my own food,' she answered simply. 'Till your bones stick through your skin!' Mary sneered. 'See you, do you know one man you could trust?' The shadow fell the more deeply upon Katharine, because her cousin--as she remembered every day--the one man that she could trust, was in Calais town. 'I know of two women,' she said; 'my maid Margot and Cicely Elliott.' Mary of England reflected for a long time. Her eyes sunk deep in her head, grey and baleful, had the look of her father's. 'Cicely Elliott is too well known for my woman,' she said. 'Thy maid Margot is a great lump, too. Hath she no lover?' The magister was in Paris. 'But a brother she hath,' Katharine said; 'one set upon advancement.' Mary said moodily: 'Advancement, then, may be in this. God knoweth his own good time. But you might tell him; or it were better you should bid her tell him.... In short words, and fur ... wait.' She had a certain snake-like eagerness and vehemence in her motions. She opened swiftly an aumbry in which there stood a tankard of milk. She took a clean pen, and then turned upon Katharine. 'Before thou goest upon this errand,' she said, 'I would have thee know that, for thee, there may be a traitor's death in this--and some glory in Heaven.' 'You write to the Empress,' Katharine cried. 'I write to a man,' the Lady Mary said. 'Might you speak with clear eyes to my father if you knew more than that?' 'I do not believe that you would bring your father down,' Katharine said. 'Why, you have a very comfortable habit of belief,' Mary sneered at her. 'In two words! Will you carry this treasonable letter or no?' 'God help me,' Katharine cried. 'Well, God help you,' her mistress jeered. 'Two nights agone you swore to be my woman and no other man's. Here you are in a taking. Think upon it.' She dipped her white pen in the milk and began to write upon a great sheet of paper, holding her head aslant to see the shine of the fluid.