CHAPTER XI.
THE FIRST INSTALMENT OF AN OLD DEBT.
We must now return to Elsley, who had walked home in a state of mind truly pitiable.

He had been flattering his soul with the hope that Thurnall did not know him; that his beard, and the change which years had made, formed a sufficient disguise: but he could not conceal from himself that the very same alterations had not prevented his recognising Thurnall; and he had been living for two months past in continual fear that that would come which now had come.
His rage and terror knew no bounds.

Fancying Thurnall a merely mean and self-interested worldling, untouched by those higher aspirations which stood to him in place of a religion, he imagined him making every possible use of his power; and longed to escape to the uttermost ends of the earth from his old tormentor, whom the very sea would not put out of the way, but must needs cast ashore at his very feet, to plague him afresh.
What a net he had spread around his own feet, by one act of foolish vanity! He had taken his present name, merely as a _nom de guerre_, when first he came to London as a penniless and friendless scribbler.
It would hide him from the ridicule (and, as he fancied, spite) of Thurnall, whom he dreaded meeting every time he walked London streets, and who was for years, to his melancholic and too intense fancy, his _bete noir_, his Frankenstein's familiar.

Beside, he was ashamed of the name of Briggs.

It certainly is not an euphonious or aristocratic name; and "The Soul's Agonies, by John Briggs," would not have sounded as well as "The Soul's Agonies, by Elsley Vavasour." Vavasour was a very pretty name, and one of those which is supposed by novelists and young ladies to be aristocratic;--why so is a puzzle; as its plain meaning is a tenant-farmer, and nothing more nor less.