Read these lines: "Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger." The quoted lines explain the narrator's reaction chiefly by pointing to

1. The quoted lines give a cause before they give the effect: he never enjoyed her soothing presence or her watchful care to any considerable extent. 2. The effect follows, that the news of her death moved him about as much as the death of a stranger would have. 3. So the reaction is traced to the small amount of time he was allowed with her, option A. 4. Distance, the length of the illness and other children are not what the quoted lines give as the reason, even where they might be true elsewhere. 5. Option C is the likeliest trap, since illness is easy to assume, but the quoted lines rest the explanation on absence rather than on how she died. _Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), public domain_