This certainly has the feel of a short story to it. It takes it's time getting there, but the denouement is surprisingly effective. It all centres on the increasingly obsessive captain of engineers "Herman" (Anton Walbrook) who spends most of his cold and snowy St. Petersburg evenings with his aristocratic friends as they play faro. He never joins in, but that is because he has learned that the grandmother of one of his friends supposedly sold her soul to the devil in return for a secret that made her invincible at the card table. Determined to discover this secret, he befriends her confident "... lees de rest.