medium · Act reading

Read the following passage, then answer the question. When the lighthouse keeper retired after forty years, the harbor town held a banquet in his honor, and the speeches praised his steadiness, his lonely vigils, his refusal of even a single night off. He smiled through all of it. But what he remembered, riding home in the dark, was not the duty. It was the particular quality of certain dawns, when fog lifted off the water in sheets and the whole bay turned the color of a struck match. He had never told anyone that he stayed for those. The passage most strongly suggests that the keeper's true motivation for his long service differed from how others understood it in that:

1. the townspeople admired his discipline, but he was sustained instead by a private delight in the beauty he witnessed.
2. he resented the banquet and the speeches given in his honor.
3. he had secretly taken many nights off without the town's knowledge.
4. he stayed at the lighthouse only because he had no family to return to.

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