resolving escaped markup characters in web service

[DaveS]

I have a web service that returns one parameter which is defined as a
string. In this string is returned an XML document (due to the fact that I
have a large amount of data to pass back to the caller). When I get this
XML data back from the web service, in my calling app, it looks fine if the
calling app is a .NET app, but when I try to call this web service from
something like XML SPY, I get all sorts of escape characters returned in
that parameter. (e.g &lt; instead of <). Does anyone know why my .NET
client seems to have regular characters but XML Spy has escaped characters?

Is there a way to force my web service to always return non-escape style XML
in that parameter?

-Dave