Let me take him a little, I beg you.

Have no fear, I'll hold him very gently, he will feel that it is I, and perhaps that will rouse him." At last the Cardinal raised his head and looked at her, and allowed her to take his place after kissing her with distracted passion, his eyes the while full of tears--a sudden burst of emotion in which his great love for the young woman melted the stern frigidity which he usually affected.
"Ah! my poor child, my poor child!" he stammered, trembling from head to foot like an oak-tree about to fall.

Immediately afterwards, however, he mastered himself, and whilst Pierre and Don Vigilio, mute and motionless, regretted that they could be of no help, he walked slowly to and fro.
Soon, moreover, that bed-chamber became too small for all the thoughts revolving in his mind, and he strayed first into the dressing-room and then down the passage as far as the dining-room.

And again and again he went to and fro, grave and impassible, his head low, ever lost in the same gloomy reverie.

What were the multitudinous thoughts stirring in the brain of that believer, that haughty Prince who had given himself to God and could do naught to stay inevitable Destiny?
From time to time he returned to the bedside, observed the progress of the disorder, and then started off again at the same slow regular pace, disappearing and reappearing, carried along as it were by the monotonous alternations of forces which man cannot control.