In plain words
All my life I must live as a maiden. I must offer my whole life to God,’ she had resolved. A curtain was tied all round her, four companions held it, and in the middle she was going into the river. The prince riding by on his horse saw the girl's face. The malady began. He turned his horse back. He began making enquiries of the maids who had come with her: who was this maiden? Afraid to tell his father about the maiden himself, he had the minister tell him. ‘Today I saw a beautiful girl. I must marry that girl,’ he said. She was a vaṇik's daughter in that same village, that is, a merchant's daughter. She was that merchant's only daughter. They went and asked the father. The father was very happy: ‘The prince is coming as my son-in-law, is he not? What fortune could be greater than this?’ and he rejoiced greatly within. But he did not tell the girl. She came to know of this and arrived at a decision: she would not marry. But she did not want to tell her father. Wondering whether he would be hurt if she told him, and what the king would say if she did not, she went on suffering within. One day she bathed in the Gaṅgā and came home. Her father was sitting on the front verandah. ‘Father! For a week now you have been sad. What is the reason?’ she asked. Meanwhile, every day, the king was sending word: ‘When? When?’ In the prince too the temperature kept rising like typhoid fever: when, oh when, would his marriage to that maiden take place? She spoke. ‘I will not marry.’ Then her father asked, ‘How am I to tell the king?’ ‘Tell him, “Our daughter has no wish to marry,”’ she said. When they told him this news, the king threatened, ‘I am the king; even by force I will marry my son to your daughter.’ When this news reached the father, he was in great distress. He was in anguish, wondering at what minute they would send some soldier and carry off his child. But. In the evening the girl went to the Gaṅgā, bathed, came back and sat down in dhyāna. ‘O God! Give me some way by which my vow is not broken in any way, the king is not displeased, and my father has no worry of any kind,’ she prayed.