Sometimes, Methodists, or Presbyterians or heretics, whatever we may be, we are irresistibly impelled to the conclusion that things were simply bound to happen!  However slight the cause,—­still that cause was predestined from the beginning of time.  A girl may by the sheerest accident, step from the street-car a block ahead of her destination,—­an irritating incident.  But as she walks that block she may meet an old-time friend, and a stranger.  And that stranger,—­ah, you can never convince the girl that her stepping from the car too soon was not ordered when the foundations of the world were laid.

Even so with Prudence, good Methodist daughter that she was.  We ask her, “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?  I love it.  Sometime will you let me ride your wheel?”

“Why, certainly.  You may ride now if you like.”

“No,” said Prudence slowly, “I am afraid it would not do for me to ride now.  Some of the members might see me, and—­well, I am very grown up, you know.—­Of course,” she added hastily, “it is different with you.  You ride for business, but it would be nothing but a frolic with me.  I want to get up at six o’clock and go early in the morning when the world is fast asleep.  Let me take it to-morrow morning, will you?  It is Saturday, and you won’t be going to school.”