--what did it mean?

It meant at least that Mrs. Warrender did not object to the continuance
of that intercourse, that perhaps Chatty herself--perhaps Chatty---- His
pulses had been beating hotly enough before: but when this thought came,
the mingling of a delicious sort of intoxicating pleasure with the misery
was more than he could bear. When he got home to his rooms he opened the
despatch box which had accompanied him through all his wanderings, and
which, he suddenly recollected, should "anything happen to him," held
all the indications of a secret in his life without any explanation of
it, and went over its contents. He was interrupted in the midst of this
by a chance and inopportune visitor, no less than a younger brother,
who pulled the papers about, and cried, "Hallo, what's this?" with the
unjustifiable freedom of a near relation, bringing Dick's heart into his
mouth, and furnishing him with a dreadful example of what might be, were
a touch of more authority laid upon those scattered _debris_ of his life.
A young brother could be sent away, or otherwise disposed of, but there
might come those who could not be sent away. When he was alone again, he
found the few papers connected with his secret amid many others of no
consequence, and it gave Dick a curious thrill, half of amusement, to
think of the spring of astonished interest with which some problematical
person who might examine these papers after his death would come upon
this little trace of something so different from the tame relics of
every day. There was the letter which she had left behind her setting
him free, as the lawless creature intended; there was the marriage
certificate and some little jumble of mementos which somehow, without
any will of his, had got associated with the more important papers. Dick
looked over the bundle as if through the eyes of that man who would go
through them after his death, finding out this appalling mystery. The
man would be delighted, though it might not be a pleasant discovery--it
might (Dick went on imagining to himself) throw a horrible doubt, as old
What's-his-name said, upon the standing of his widow, upon the rights of
his child--but the man who found it would be delighted. It would come
so unexpectedly amid all these uninteresting letters and records of
expenditure. It would brighten them up with the zest of a story, of a
discovery; it would add an interest to all the lawyer's investigations
into his estate. All