'Guess I'll just look through it myself. Where's Act I? Here we are! Have a cigar while you're waiting?' Rutherford settled himself in his chair, and watched the other's face. For the first few pages, which contained some tame dialogue between minor characters, it was blank. '"Enter Willie,"' he said. 'Am I Willie?' 'I hope so,' said Rutherford, with a smile. 'It's the star part.' 'H'm.' He went on reading. Rutherford watched him with furtive keenness. There was a line coming at the bottom of the page which he was then reading which ought to hit him, an epigram on golf, a whimsical thought put almost exactly as he had put it himself five minutes back when telling his golf story. The shot did not miss fire. The chuckle from the actor and the sigh of relief from Rutherford were almost simultaneous. Winfield Knight turned to him. 'That's a dandy line about golf,' said he. Rutherford puffed complacently at his cigar. 'There's lots more of them in the piece,' he said. 'Bully for you,' said the actor. And went on reading. Three-quarters of an hour passed before he spoke again. Then he looked up. 'It's me,' he said; 'it's me all the time. I wish I'd seen this before I put on the punk I'm doing now. This is me from the drive off the tee. It's great! Say, what'll you have?' Rutherford leaned back in his chair, his mind in a whirl. He had arrived at last. His struggles were over. He would not admit of the possibility of the play being a failure. He was a made man. He could go where he pleased, and do as he pleased. It gave him something of a shock to find how persistently his thoughts refused to remain in England. Try as he might to keep them there, they kept flitting back to Alcala. 6 _Willie in the Wilderness_ was not a failure. It was a triumph. Principally, it is true, a personal triumph for Winfield Knight. Everyone was agreed that he had never had a part that suited him so well. Critics forgave the blunders of the piece for the sake of its principal character. The play was a curiously amateurish thing. It was only later that Rutherford learned craft and caution. When he wrote _Willie_ he was a colt, rambling unchecked through the field of play-writing, ignorant of its pitfalls. But, with all its faults, _Willie in the Wilderness_ was a success. It might, as one critic pointed out, be more of a monologue act for Winfield Knight than a play, but that did not affect Rutherford.