There were exactly twelve houses opposite.  The corner one farthest from the river she called the gray-haired house.  An old lady lived there who knitted bright worsted; also a fat old gentleman in a gay skull-cap who showed much attention to a long-leaved rubber-plant that flourished behind the glass of the street door.  Gwendolyn leaned out, chin on palm, to canvass the quaintly curtained windows—­none of which at the moment framed a venerable head.  Next the gray-haired house there had been—­up to a recent date—­a vacant lot walled off from the sidewalk by a high, broad bill-board.  Now a pit yawned where formerly was the vacant space.  And instead of the fascinating pictures that decorated the bill-board (one week a baby, rosy, dimpled and laughing; the next some huge lettering elaborately combined with a floral design; the next a mammoth bottle, red and beautiful, and flanked by a single gleaming word:  “Catsup”) there towered—­above street and pit, and even above the chimneys of the gray-haired house—­the naked girders of a new steel structure.

The girders were black, but rusted to a brick-color in patches and streaks.  They were so riveted together that through them could be seen small, regular spots of light.  Later on, as Gwendolyn knew, floors and windowed walls and a tin top would be fitted to the framework.  And what was now a skeleton would be another house!

Directly opposite the nursery, on that part of the side street which sloped, were ten narrow houses, each four stories high, each with brown-stone fronts and brown-stone steps, each topped by a large chimney and a small chimney.  In every detail these ten houses were precisely alike.  Jane, for some unaccountable reason, referred to them as private dwellings.  But since the roof of the second brown-stone house was just a foot lower than the roof of the first, the third roof just a foot lower than the roof of the second, and so on to the very tenth and last, Gwendolyn called these ten the step-houses.

The step-houses were seldom interesting.  As Gwendolyn’s glances traveled now from brown-stone front to brown-stone front, not one presented even the relief of a visiting post-man.

Her progress down the line of step-houses brought her by degrees to the brick house on the Drive—­a large vine-covered house, the wide entrance of which was toward the river.  And no sooner had she given it one quick glance than she uttered a little shout of pleased surprise.  The brick-house people were back!

All the shades were up.  There was smoke rising from one of the four tall chimneys.  And even as Gwendolyn gazed, all absorbed interest, the net curtains at an upper window were suddenly drawn aside and a face looked out.

It was a face that Gwendolyn had never seen before in the brick house.  But though it was strange, it was entirely friendly.  For as Gwendolyn smiled it a greeting, it smiled her a greeting back!

She was a nurse-maid—­so much was evident from the fact that she wore a cap.  But it was also plain that her duties differed in some way from Jane’s.  For her cap was different—­shaped like a sugar-bowl turned upside-down; hollow, and white, and marred by no flying strings.