"What if you had not gone out for a ride that morning?" And Prudence,
laughing, answers, "Oh, but I had to go, you see." "Well," we continue,
"if you had not met him that way, you could have met him some other way,
I suppose." "Oh, no," declares Prudence decidedly, "it had to happen
just that way."

After all, down in plain ink on plain paper, it was very simple. Across
the street from the parsonage was a little white cottage set back among
tall cedars. In this cottage lived a girl named Mattie Moore,--a common,
unlovely, unexciting girl, with whom Romance could not apparently be
intimately concerned. Mattie Moore taught a country school five miles
out from town, and she rode to and from her school, morning and evening,
on a bicycle.

Years before, when Prudence was young and bicycles were fashionable, she
had been intensely fond of riding. But as she gained in age, and
bicycles lost in popularity, she discarded the amusement as unworthy a
parsonage damsel.

One evening, early in June, when the world was fair to look upon, it was
foreordained that Prudence should be turning in at the parsonage gate
just as Mattie Moore whirled up, opposite, on her dusty wheel. Prudence
stopped to interchange polite inanities with her neighbor, and Mattie,
wheeling the bicycle lightly beside her, came across the street and stood
beneath the parsonage maples with Prudence. They talked of the weather,
of the coming summer, of Mattie's school, rejoicing that one more week
would bring freedom from books for Mattie and the younger parsonage girls.

Then said Prudence, seemingly of her own free will, but really directed
by an all-controlling Providence, "Isn't it great fun to ride a bicycle?