But if he doesn't send the money as usual, I'll find some way to make him, see if I don't! You're off your head, I think.' Emma had anticipated this, and was prepared to bear the brunt of her sister's anger.

Kate was not originally blessed with much sweetness of disposition, and an unhappy marriage had made her into a sour, nagging woman.

But, in spite of her wretched temper and the low moral tone induced during her years of matrimony, she was not evil-natured, and her chief safeguard was affection for her sister Emma.

This seldom declared itself, for she was of those unhappily constituted people who find nothing so hard as to betray the tenderness of which they are capable, and, as often as not, are driven by a miserable perversity to words and actions which seem quite inconsistent with such feeling.

For Jane she had cared far less than for Emma, yet her grief at Jane's death was more than could be gathered from her demeanour.