Smoky heart design with ace of hearts

You will not believe what I saw in the smoking room on the crossing. Mr Halloran, the purser's clerk with the ginger moustache, sat down to cards with a stranger who never once took off his gloves. The room was so thick with pipe smoke by ten o'clock that the lamps looked like pennies at the bottom of a pond. Every hand the stranger played was an ace of hearts. Not the same card twice, mind, but the same dark red heart on every one, and he laid them down the way a parson lays out hymn numbers.

Halloran lost his wages in an hour, then his watch, then the brass cufflinks his mother gave him. When he reached for the last of it, a thin line of candle wax ran down the table leg and pooled on the floorboards, and the stranger only smiled and said the heart always falls where the candle gutters. I thought he was mad. I still think so. But he dealt Halloran one more card, face up, and it was the ace, and the steward swore he heard a sound like a slow bell go through the whole saloon.

Nobody has seen the stranger since. The cards are still on the baize, every one an ace, and the cloud of smoke has not cleared from the ceiling. I have asked the captain to have the room scrubbed, but he says the ventilators have been drawing that smoke up into the stars all week, and he would rather not go up and look.

Your loving brother, Tom