Read the passage from “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”

“And what do you think of it all, Watson?” asked Sherlock Holmes, leaning back in his chair.
“….if the lady is correct in saying that the flooring and walls are sound, and that the door, window, and chimney are impassable, then her sister must have been undoubtedly alone when she met her mysterious end.”
“What becomes, then, of these nocturnal whistles, and what of the very peculiar words of the dying woman?”
“I cannot think.”
”When you combine the ideas of whistles at night, the presence of a band of gypsies…the fact that we have every reason to believe that the doctor has an interest in preventing his stepdaughter’s marriage,…and, finally, the fact that Miss Helen Stoner heard a metallic clang…I think there is good ground to think that the mystery may be cleared along those lines.”

Which character serves as Sherlock Holmes’s confidante?




Watson



Miss Helen Stoner



Miss Stoner’s stepfather, a doctor



a gypsy