I can help you to have confidence.  But I cannot exert your will for you; you must do that.  To begin with, I shall give you a very simple task.  I think I can understand a little your present attitude toward me.  You are in doubt.  I wish you to be in doubt, for the moment.  I wish your curiosity and desires for and against to be so evenly balanced that you will have no difficulty in choosing for or against.  You are just in that condition.  You have feared and mistrusted me; now your fear and suspicion are leaving you, and curiosity is balancing against indolence.  I do not bid you to make an effort to will; I leave it entirely to you to determine now whether you will struggle against weakness or submit to it; whether you will begin to use your sleeping will-power or else continue to accept what comes.”

I rose to my feet at once.

“What is your decision?” asked the Doctor smiling—­the first smile I had ever seen on his face.

“I will be a man!” I exclaimed.

* * * * *

I became a frequent visitor at the Doctor’s, and gradually learned more and more of this remarkable man.  His little daughter told me much, that I could never have guessed.  She was a very serious child, perhaps of eleven years, and not very attractive.  In fact, she was ugly, but her gravity seemed somehow to suit her so well that I could by no means dislike her.  Her father was very fond of her; of an evening the three of us would sit in the west room; the Doctor would smoke and read; I would read some special matter—­usually on philosophy—­selected by my tutor; Lydia would sit silently by, engaged in sewing or knitting, and absorbed seemingly in her own imaginings.  Lydia at one time said some words which I could not exactly catch, and which made me doubt the seeming poverty of her father, but I attributed her speech to the natural pride of a child who thinks its father great in every way.  I was not greatly interested, moreover, in the domestic affairs of the household, and never thought of asking for information that seemed withheld.  I learned from the child’s talk, at odd times when the Doctor would be absent from the room, that they were foreigners,—­a fact which.  I had already taken for granted,—­but I was never made to know the land of their birth.  It was certain that Dr. Khayme could speak German and French, and I could frequently see him reading in books printed in characters unknown to me.  Several times I have happened to come unexpectedly into the presence of the father and daughter when they were conversing in a tongue which I was sure I had never heard.  The Doctor had no companions.  He was at home, or at school, or else on the way from the one to the other.  No visitor ever showed himself when I was at the cottage.  Lydia attended the convent school.  I understood from remarks dropped incidentally, as well as from seeing the books she had, that her studies were the languages in the main, and I had strong evidence that, young as she was, her proficiency in French and German far exceeded my own acquirements.