Filtering "Highlighted Content" (modern web part) by Page folder

Hi All, I appreciate your assistance in advance:

As background: My company uses SharePoint Online (as part of our Office 365 subscription) to power our intranet. I'm the administrator for my department's SharePoint site, and I'm currently configuring new content resources within this site. I'm using SharePoint's Modern Site Pages for these pages, and I'm developing the content in the standard Site Pages page library. I've enabled folders within the page library to help us organize this content.

What I'd like to do is use the Highlighted Content web part to display a list of pages within a sub-folder, ordered by publish date. This web part does not appear to include the ability to easily filter by folder, but I'm hoping there may be a workaround by using the "Page Properties" filter option.

My current settings within this web part are:

• Source: The page library on this site
• Type: Pages

SharePoint Community, any thoughts on ways to leverage the Filter capabilities to achieve this goal? I fully anticipate that I'd need to select/specify the folder name (or path) that I'd want to search on, I just don't know if this is possible or how to set this up. Any other thoughts on how to achieve this if this goal if I can't do so with this particular web part?

Thanks so much for your help!