The Queen of Spades

“In Petersburg a young officer tells his friends how his grandmother, an old countess, once won back a ruinous gambling debt in Paris with three cards whose secret she has kept for sixty years. Hermann, a careful, ambitious engineer who never gambles, cannot forget the story. He courts the countess's poor ward to get into the house, confronts the old woman in her bedroom at night — and frightens her to death. Then the dead woman comes to him with the secret: three, seven, ace.”