She did not think much about the olive-tree, although it was a good
friend. She was paid twenty sous a day to gather the berries from the
ground, which were then taken to the crushing mill up the ravine to be
made into oil. Gita ate the green lemons plucked from the trees as a
child of the North would eat apples, but she loved the good olive-oil
better. When the grandmother made a feast, it was to fry the little
silvery sardines in oil, so crisp and brown.

The olive-tree is a native of Asia Minor, and often mentioned in the
Bible. Some of the trees in the garden where Gita now worked were so old
that the Romans saw them when they conquered the world.

At noon the olive-pickers paused to rest. Gita went away alone, and ate
the handful of chestnuts given her by grandmother. When she returned to
the town at night she would have another bit of bread and a raw onion.
She seated herself on the edge of the ravine, and thought about Raphael
as she munched her nuts. Below, this path traversed the ravine, and
climbed the opposite slope to the wall of a pretty villa, one of the
houses occupied for the winter by rich strangers. Gita looked at the
villa, with its window shaded by lace curtains, balconies, and terraces,
where orange-trees were covered with little golden balls of fruit.

"If I were rich like that I would have soup every day, sometimes made of
pumpkin and sometimes with macaroni in it," she thought.

Then she turned over a stone with her heavy shoe, and it rolled down the
hill. Gita uttered a cry. The stone had covered a hole at the root of
the olive-tree where she sat, far away from the other workers. In the
hole she saw a green frog; she dropped on her knees to look at it more
closely. Yes, it was a green frog. How did it come there? She touched it
with her fingers; the frog did not move or croak. Then she took it out
carefully. The frog was one of those pasteboard boxes which appear each
year in the shop windows of Paris for Easter presents, in company with
fish, lobsters, and shells.

Gita raised the lid. Inside were bank-bills and a lizard. She knew
lizards very well; they were always whisking over the stone walls; but
then those were of a sober brown tint, while this one was white until
she lifted it, when it sparkled like a dewdrop. The lizard was an
ornament made of diamonds. Gita held her breath and closed her eyes. She
believed herself asleep. Soon she rose, took the box in her hand, and
crossing the rav