A young prince is soon to be wed, but not to his sweetheart, a miller's daughter. The Prince goes to the mill with expensive presents to tell the young maiden they must soon part. Her grief is so profound that she throws herself into the river, becoming rusalka (a water nymph).
At the wedding ball maidens sing wedding songs. Unexpectedly, someone begins to sing a song about a charming maid who drowned herself and as she was dying put a curse on her lover. Singer's voice seems familiar to the Prince, and he bids his valet find the miller's daughter. But she has vanished.
Several years pass. The Prince is eager to visit the mill again. There he finds nothing but silence and desolation.

"It's fallen into disrepair, a heap of ruins.
The merry sound of turning wheels is gone;
The millstone grinds no more…
A path once there, is now overgrown,
For many years no one has gone that way.
Where is the garden with its high fence?
Could it really have grown into this wild thicket?
Is that how things have come to pass?"

The prince realizes that he was only ever truly happy there with the miller's daughter.
A baby is born to Rusalka. She sends her water baby to the bank of the river to met the Prince and tell him that he is her father. Should the Prince ask her whether Rusalka has forgotten him or not, the baby is to say that her mother remembers him, loves him and invites him to their home.
The Prince meets the water baby and exclaims:

"What's this I see?
Say, pretty child, whence came you?"

This is the end of Pushkin's unfinished poem in verse, "Rusalka"

(English language retelling was done by Vadim Shchanitsyn)