The topmost leaf of the sheaf contained a stanza and a half of a poem in an original metre describing how a nightingale came nightly to visit a certain rose, but the rose being only a bud, failed to understand what was the meaning of the music, until on the evening of a burning day, when the Star of Love shed the only light that came from the sky through the heavy scented air that hovered on the rose-garden, “The faithful nightingale sang this song: “.... That was where the manuscript ended. There was space enough on the paper for two more stanzas. All that was needed was to put into words the song that the nightingale sang to stir the rosebud into the bloom of passion. That was the reflection of the man of science as he read the ambitious prelude which he had written the previous day just when the leader writers on all the newspapers in England were pointing out how the adaptation of electricity to the turbine boat marked the most important epoch in the history of marine engineering. “That’s all I have got to do,” he muttered now, when the cables were carrying to all parts of the world the news that Sir Creighton Severn’s electric turbine had just been tested over the measured mile with the most surprising results, a record speed of forty-two knots having been noted. “Only the song of the nightingale,” said the man of science, seating himself at the desk with the unfinished poem in front of him. He wrote for two hours, completing the poem entitled “What the Nightingale sang to the Rose,” which when published above the name “_Alençon Hope_” in a magazine three months later was so widely commented on, some critics going so far as to declare with that confidence which is the chief part of the equipment of the critic, that in all the recently published volume by the same author nothing more exquisite could be found. It was Sir Creighton’s little fun to publish, unknown to any one in the world, a volume of verse that had achieved a brilliant success in the world and even in his own household where its apt lines were frequently quoted both by Amber and her brother. That was how it came about that Sir Creighton smiled quite vaguely when people remarked how strange it was that young Severn had shown an early taste for writing verse. Who was it that he took after, they enquired. They felt that the exigencies of the theory of heredity were fully satisfied when Lady Severn explained that there was a tradition in her family that her father had once sent a valentine to her mother. Still it was funny, they said, to find the son of a father who was a practical “scientist”--that was what they called Sir Creighton: a “scientist”--having a tendency to write verse.