I must confess that I set down so fantastic a tale only after hesitation and skeptical misgiving. It, and what is to follow, reads like a piece of motion picture fustian, an old wives’ tale. The meter of reasonableness and probability is not there. The whole yarn is too crudely colored. It is sensation; it is melodrama. But it seems also to be the truth. My sources are old books by reputable chroniclers, containing long quotations from the story of Masilewski, the detective, from the testimony of Wolcech Zarski, the lover who appeared in Barbara Ubrik’s life at a disastrous moment, from the proceedings of an ecclesiastical trial. Indeed, the whole thing seems to be a matter of court record in Warsaw and in Cracow, the old Polish capital. This being so, we must conclude that fiction has been once more detected in the act of going to life even for its ultimate extravagances. The years following the great revolt of 1831 were full of torment for Poland. Nicholas I, weary of what he termed the obstinacy of the people, began a series of the most dire repressions, including the closing of the Polish universities, the revocation of the constitution, the persecution of the Roman priests and a general effort to abolish the Polish language and national culture. The old nobility, made up of devout Roman Catholics and chauvinistic patriots, was especially sought out for the reactionary discipline of the czar, and a family like that of Barbara Ubrik, whose chief had been sent to Siberia for treason, was naturally among the worst afflicted. The attempt from St. Petersburg to uproot the church of Rome was the cause of an intense devotionalism among the Poles, with the result that many men and women of distinguished families gave themselves up to the religious life and entered the monasteries and convents. This passion touched the Ubriks as well as others and Barbara, naturally of a passionate and enthusiastic nature, decided as a girl that she would retire from the world and devote herself to her forbidden faith. Her mother, Elka Satorin-Ubrik, once a ward of the Jewish family in Kiev and later the prisoner of the Gypsies, strongly opposed such a course, but in 1844, when she was 16 years old, the girl could no longer be restrained. She presented herself to the Carmelite cloister of St. Theresa in Warsaw in the spring of that year and was admitted to the novitiate.