medium · Enhanced 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:
- the townspeople admired his discipline, but he was sustained instead by a private delight in the beauty he witnessed.
- he secretly resented the entire banquet and all the flattering speeches given in his honor that particular evening
- he had quietly taken many unauthorized nights off over the years without the town or his superiors ever discovering it
- he stayed at the lighthouse for all those long decades only because he had no family or home of his own to return to elsewhere
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