So Schepstein lost a renter.  The basement cubbyhole remained vacant, with only the picture of Albert of the Kingdom of Sorrows in the window as a memento.  Nothing further was seen or heard of Plooie.  But Schepstein, wandering far afield in search of tenement sales a full year after, encountered Annie Oombrella washing down the steps of an office far over in Lewis Street, nearly to the river.  All the plumpness which she had taken on in the happy days was gone.  She looked wistful and haggard.

Schepstein, doing the polite (which, as he accurately states, costs nothing and might get you something some time), asked after Plooie.  Where was he?  Annie Oombrella shook her head.

“Left you, has he?” asked Schepstein, astonished at this evidence of iniquity.

“Yes,” said Annie Oombrella.  But there was a ring in her voice that Schepstein failed to understand.  It sounded almost like defiance.  Her eyes were deep-hollowed and sorrowful, but they met his as squarely as they could, considering their cast.  Schepstein was quite shocked to observe that there was no shame in them.  I suppose the shock temporarily unbalanced his principles, for, having caught sight of one of her shoes, he offered to lend her three dollars, indefinitely and without interest, on her bare note-of-hand. (When he saw the other shoe, he made it five.) She looked at the money anxiously, but shook her head.

“Well, if you ever need a home, the basement’s vacant and there ain’t a better basement in Our Square.”

Annie Oombrella began to cry quietly, and Schepstein went on about his business.

Through the ensuing years many women cried quietly or vehemently, according to their natures, and many men went away from places that had known them, to be no more known of those places; and the little Kingdom of Sorrows, shattered, blood-soaked, and unconquerable, stood fast, a bulwark between the ravager of the world and his victory until there sped across the death-haunted seas the army that was to turn the scales.  Our Square gave to that sacrifice what it can never recover:  witness the simple memorials in Our Square.

Many people see ghosts; Our Square is well haunted, as befits its ancient and diminished glories.  Few hear ghosts.  This is as it ought to be.  In their very nature, ghosts should be seen, not heard.  Yet, in the year of grace, 1919, under a blazing September sun, with a cicada, vagrant from heaven knows whence, frying his sizzling sausages in our lilac bush, and other equally insistent sounds of reality filling the air, my ears were smitten with a voice from the realm of wraiths.

“Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees,” it cried on a faint and cluttering note.  “Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees a raccommoder.”

Over in the far corner of the park an apparition moved into my visual range.  It looked like Plooie.  It moved like Plooie.  It was loaded like Plooie.  It opened a mouth like Plooie’s and emitted again the familiar though diminished falsetto shriek.  No doubt of it now; it was Plooie.  He had come back to us who never thought to see him again, who never wished to see him again, still unpurged of his stigma.